I met Eleonora in Bergamo. I know her ceramic labyrinth and the wanderer in her. I agree: the path of knowledge is also to have the courage to travel and get lost.

In the complex ceramic work of Ghilardi, I find that the choice made, the most difficult today, is the arduous one to be on the side of truth and freedom. It is difficult to choose when, to prevail, it is the seduction of furnishing accessories, made of materials that speak other languages (and therefore appearance kills the truth); matter is no longer what we believe we recognize. Difficult when condominiums, houses and villas are already conquered or besieged by hordes of small dreams passed off as ceramic, stone or glass art.

It doesn't matter if you work and decorated in a naive or hyper-technological way: because they are characterless and, if painted, with cold modeling paint. It is difficult for everyone to have the courage to possess less, but of quality and truth.

It is difficult for an artist to choose when convergence to a recognizable model is often demanded of art which will then bore you forever.

Eleonora has chosen her ceramic labyrinth, but she cannot get lost; has its eternal clay thread. In Eleonora's tactile Totem, in her dream, in her latest porcelain surfaces there are no allegories or citations, but stratifications of gestures stolen from those of music because the matter we observe does not want to be anything but wonderfully itself.

Giovanni Cimatti

his teacher in the art of ceramics
Faenza January 6, 2009

It is difficult to talk about his work, trying to analyze it and present it to those who read, because his production is very varied and different.

Eleonora unconsciously has already chosen her path, she knows that the quiet of a painting studio, where for years she has been using the same way of working, is not for her. Experimenting in the precise attempt to leave one's mark on the everyday object is the real strength of this young woman.

Luana Raffuzzi (painter)


Eleonora Ghilardi's is a consciously tense creative gesture, as an act of knowledge, in the ever more in-depth search for new dimensions, in which to reveal a beauty exalted in its most sublime aesthetic and intrinsic values.

In a continuous relationship between various materials, using more different and personal techniques, for Eleonora Ghilardi the ceramic never "solidifies", but is in "constant expansion, reduction, passage", the glass transparencies are sometimes used as "memory" to collect the textures and reweave the different backgrounds.

Eleonora Ghilardi's production is a "story", which reveals itself in sensations and emotions that take on more different and even abstract aspects, but which from her existential reality are more real reflections, the most vivid reverberations of her aspirations: a story that expresses itself in throbbing "artist's wing flights"

Ugo Lo Russo (journalist)


It is enough to observe even just a work by Eleonora Ghilardi to be captured by the idea that a place, a thought are also the narration - in this artistic case - that is made of it.

His art, in fact, is a precious story that manifests every time the pursuit of the unusual and expresses a pleasant overlap of stories, images, stories on the edge of memory. Eleonora chases the horizon, or rather tries to push it always a little further. It is the search for those who experiment, those who try to give shape to dreams, desires, memories ... always in the space where the unusual resides. A space that the artist returns to explore in all his creations, looking for an antidote to the homogeneity, the obviousness, of the already seen, to the blindness of what always remains the same.

His is a more than current and innovative approach to the art of sculpture ... he reveals, as a founding property, an extraordinary ability to make himself a message. The created object, which is a vase, a jewel, a sculpture, never identifies only a direct functionality, but reveals a project, a concept, a mirage, an idea, a trace of lived experience that are transformed and transfigured thanks to the extraordinary artistic qualities of this "poet of matter".

Paolo Gennari
Nonsolomoda editorial staff - Canale 5


Exploring is a verb that befits the artistic personality of Eleonora Ghilardi. Penetrate into the wonders of the world and bring with it the amazement to express it in sculpture. A sculpture, in truth, rather "unusual", for the material used: porcelain.

Sculpting with ceramic means creating through the four elements, shaping the earth with your hands, diluting the dusty pigments of the collage of engobes with water and entrusting the "body" to the fire, so that it does not break, because it is colored. It means waiting patiently for the air to cool the ardor of the flames in order to spread the crystalline pasta with which, after a new cooking, it will capture the light in the work. It means time, care and passion.

In the paintings-sculptures, pages of white porcelain modeled in overlapping layers, the color tells impressions of travels to distant lands, places steeped in history or wild, little-traveled borders, as well as those within which the artist's inspiration moves: an Icelandic fjord, an icy bay in Alaska. The ceramic sheets ripple in waves or are, in the three-dimensional sculptures, real waves from which it seems to be able to hear the roar of the sea, when it shatters on the Oregon coasts.

Eleonora's ceramics are solid bodies that pulsate, in the fragile compactness of the layers from which they are formed, of the life of the elements that compose them.

Elena Carrea - Journalist and critic


Eleonora Ghilardi's artistic creativity has reached and surpassed the imaginative. Eleonora creates inexhaustible prolificity sublime sculptural images. His field of work has no limits: jewels, brooches, earrings, necklaces not only in glass or ceramic designed, modeled and painted by hand, but, above all, in porcelain, which has become his experimentation in constant evolution. porcelain is made with innovative techniques: paper-clay, black smoke effect stoneware with sealed earths, enamel composition and engob collage.

Eleonora's artistic creativity has undergone a clear evolution. For years his path, careful to catch the signs of time, thanks also to the technical application enhancement of porcelain, has taken on a new methodological importance. The color acquires nuances that are now subtle and now strong, such as to enhance the works, which vary according to the artist's imagination and inspiration, in excellent magical configurations.

Eleonora Ghilardi, appreciated and esteemed both in Italy and abroad - her private and collective exhibitions demonstrate her success with critics and the public alike - is an unquenchable breeding ground of brisk productivity. Among the latest productions, works realized in not insignificant dimensions stand out: vases, plates, compositions that aim at the representation of volumetric and chromatic forms not without reference to the forms of sensitive reality, which sometimes go beyond concreteness to cross into the most utopian abstraction. An almost unreal world, in which there is a sense of uncommon spirituality, purely creative, conceptual, but always determined by specificity.

Ugo Lo Russo (journalist)