One of the most common reproaches that we have moved to the Italian system in these years have been that they didn't known and not yet know how to valorize the Italian artists neither the territory. For this reason the opening of the Museum Bertozzi & Casoni at Cavallerizza Ducale in Sassuolo, thanks to the help and the appointment of Franco Stefani, president of the Gruppo System, surprises and comforts.

"The Museum Bertozzi & Casoni is a homage to the artists and is my Christmas gift to Sassuolo and the whole territory" Franco Stefani affirms. "People can admire as with works as these the ceramics has entered by law the world of the contemporary art using at the same time techniques that ask for a mastery from Renaissance workshop and recent technologies. This in a special place for Sassuolo: the Cavallerizza Ducale. A building from the extraordinary architecture that has returned to new life with a cultural and social function, acquitting what was our objective: to give back to the city a historical place and of great thickness from the point of view of the cultural patrimony", Stefani says.

A really important Christmas gift considering that it shows the collection of the duo Bertozzi & Casoni, a society among two international leading artists that really here in Emilia Romagna have the base of their activity. An unique artistic practice, able to make to converse a handicraft product as the ceramics with an ampler reflection on the contemporaneity and in general on the condition of the man: the ceramics, a very beautiful material but also very fragile as our existence; the refusals of the human society object of the their marvelous vanitas where the waste, the short-lived one becomes important, beautiful, interesting, it becomes art; the relationship between nature and culture, between nature and man where the nature at least in the space of the art takes space on what the man created giving them a new life.

In Bertozzi & Casoni's art we can find the complexity of the life: the beauty and the death, the spirituality and the materiality, the strength and the weakness. Sociological and philosophical reflections dearly tie them to an aesthetical and artistic surrender of great level and ample breath. Their practice is not only craftsmanship, it is not only ceramics but expression of a great mastery of the contemporary art. Bertozzi & Casonis mould the ceramics as the demiurgo moulded the matter of the universe. They set us in front of ourselves, to what we are, what we do as if we had in front of us a mirror. In those ceramics there are not only plants, flowers, animals, refusals... there are us even if we can find only traces of us. There is our passage, our sign, and this becomes motive for reflection and growth.

As Franco Bertoni affirms at the Museum Bertozzi & Casonis there are in permanent show works rarely exposed as Composizione e scomposizione, 2007, Composizione non finita-infinita showed at Venice Biennial in 2009, Sedia elettrica con farfalle, 2011, Regeneration showed in London in 2012, Polar bear, 2016 and Resistenza 2 created for their recent show in Ascoli Piceno. Do not forget Scegli il Paradiso, 1997, that admirably closes the chapter of the painted maiolica and Madonna scheletrita, 2008 that represents one of their best masterpieces.