March the 19th Milan.
Every birthday is a beginning and today, for Gualtiero Marchesi eightieth, we announce the birth of his foundation.
“A term that gives the immediate perception of something that will last and join the effort of a lifetime- Enrico Dandolo the vice-president underlines- Gualtiero Marchesi foundation will nurture the teaching of what is refined and the attention to is beautiful, in other words the diffusion of the arts through taste, the only tool available to anyone who may be educated.
The personal history and the career of Gualtiero Marchesi have always been interweaved with a love and curiosity towards painting, sculpture, literature and most of all music. There is even, regarding the latter, a vocation, but one may rightly say a family karma.
Today the Marchesi family gathers three generations of musicians who play for themselves and for others renewing a tradition that dates back to the eighteen hundreds, to the Sicilian great-grandmother, a piano teacher of the Florio family.
For the chef who considers cuisine an art and not simply craftsmanship, as brilliant and seductive as it may be, one is fed in the same measure by the tasteful and by the beautiful. Only by these means is it possible to return to the Greek concept of logodeipnon, or banquet of words by which the main course was referred to.
The simplifications of this attitude have been, over the years, the dishes that paid homage to some favourite artists from Pollock(fish dripping) to Burri (burri egg)to Piero Manzoni(the a-chromes of sea bass)to Hsiao Chin(creamed risotto with a scent of white and… black truffles).
Ethics and aesthetics share six letters out of ten, a small difference that makes them useful one to the other in order to avoid for the first of the two to turn into a simple cult, slipping towards the bias of the beautiful an the ugly.
But if what is beautiful is good then virtue and necessity, ambition and concreteness become one, as is stated in a recent book written in six hands by Marchesi together with Salvatore Nola and Aldo Spoldi both the Brera academy of fine arts; then the risk of becoming aesthetes or opportunists lessens and becomes acceptable.
Which is the object and playground of the Gualtiero Marchesi foundation?
To start from children and prepare them to beauty beginning from pre-school age. To cultivate a taste for all the arts through courses in music, painting, sculpture, drama and culinary workshops.
To discover the truth of a flavour requires the same attention and yielding that listening to music does or does the knowledge of an instrument, the use of drawing and the abandonment to theatrical gesture
Together with this sort of art breeding ground the Gualtiero Marchesi foundation will take care of adults and in particular those chefs who have already started their own work path or even those who have just left Alma, the international school of Italian cuisine.
To them who have perhaps already learnt to cook we foresee the next step, one for which the presence of a guide is crucial, i.e. the opening to a creative vision.
Creativeness and mastery are two different things. There are very skilled people who don’t and will never create anything.
The bottom line is another. Understanding what it means to create, training the soul to that leap that distinguishes, in moments of great freedom, a great execution from a work of art.
Capable executors can interpret according to their sensibility the great repertoires-Gualtiero Marchesi, president of the foundation underlines- while creative cooks as much as artists manage to create something that can last, becoming a benchmark and a model for others.
Those who will take part to the foundation’s master’s degree will be able to elaborate, with teachers and artists, what there can be of creative in a culinary thought that is truly liberated.
