Sentinels From the Depths. Maria Rosa Franzin and Gigi Mariani on the occasion of the exhibition Interaktion- Interazione at Galerie Isabella Hund during Schmuck 2025

Our lives are deeply rooted in the Spirit of Times. We live and work, we use technology, we are constantly hyper-connected, and…alas! willingly neglectful of our transient nature. We experience love, grief, happiness, sadness, melancholy, and countless emotions. We taste life and sail this Zeitgeist sometimes with the memory of everything and sometimes with the memory of nothing.
But there’s something unpredictable, elusive, slippery. There’s something we cannot explain that resonates with a different world. There are unanswered questions, dreams, and intuitions as we sense the unknown, and a bewildering awe while we explore the unconscious: this is the Spirit of the Depths. [1]

Our lives oscillate between one world and another because we know that the keys that allow us to go back and forth from the Spirit of the Depths are dreams, philosophy, and arts. These disciplines allow us to cross the threshold of the Zeitgeist and experience what there is beyond the mirror, or Die Andere Seite. Together with philosophy, arts are the media that make that necessary room to decline awe into knowledge, enabling us to be conscious of the complexity of our inner self and the world. This interaction is vital and it happens every time we dream, read poems, or novels, or look at works of art.

So, since in poetry nothing is merely ordinary, the same is in the field of jewellery, where nothing is a mere surface. Surfaces widen dimensions and let us journey back and forth from the Spirit of the Times -which includes tools, techniques, methods of construction, and thoughts- to the Spirit of the Depths which contains ideas, questions, possible answers, hints of the unknown, the unconscious, the unexplored: the territory of wonder.
As “sentinels of the Depths,” jewelry surfaces act as thresholds and breaches into an unexplored territory where several dialectical interactions take place among the artist, the body of works, the eye of the beholder, and the wearer and what lies beyond the surface.

And this happens when we look at the works of the two Italian authors, Maria Rosa Franzin and Gigi Mariani now on display at Galerie Isabella Hund for the exhibition  INTERAKTION-INTERAZIONE.
We experience a journey from one world to another enriched by an “open” interaction throughout multiple worlds and levels. The two renowned Italian authors dialogue together evoking an open territory of creation and invention where the Spirit of the Depths emerges from their pictorial surfaces. While using gold and niello (Mariani) or, gold powder, net, “singing” silver, or resins (Franzin), the surfaces expand themselves and welcome all of us.

Both the reduction of materials and the essential lines, combined with a solid goldsmith technique, are immersed in the Spirit of Times providing balance and calibrations of weights and structures, and yet something still emerges from the Depths confronting us with new dimensions.
It is a matter of internal rhythms strictly inherent with the pieces, and something more: something that resonates from elsewhere.
The pieces, real sentinels of the Depths, ask us to pay attention and focus our attention on details: they frame our gaze on what lies beyond the surfaces.

And so…since in poetry, nothing is merely ordinary, so in the field of jewellery nothing is merely a decoration: the shades of imagination and the happiness of creation are the tools that provide multiple interactions not only between the authors but also among the pieces themselves.
By such means, several are the connections emerging from the exhibition: some of them are “written”, others “unwritten”. The ones between the artists, the ones among the artists and the gallerist; those among the pieces following the counterpoints of materials, shapes, and the forms of rhythms; those among the pieces, the eye of the beholder and the wearer, and many others.

So, how many INTERAKTION(s)! Do you know?  Start to count the ways…..

Nichka Marobin, Art Historian and Independent Curator


[1]: For the Spirit of Time and the Spirit of Depths see: C.G. JUNG – S. Shamdasani (ed.), New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.



Melodic line:
Arvo Pärt, Tabula Rasa, ECM Records;
G. B. Pergolesi, Flute Concert in G Major n. 1

About the author

Nichka Marobin is an Italian art historian specialized in Dutch and Flemish art history. She graduated from the faculty of letters of Padova (Italy) with a dissertation on Renaissance ornament prints from 1500 to 1550 in Germany and the Low Lands, focusing on the migration of forms, themes, and styles on the engravings of Cornelis Bos, Cornelis Floris II, Lucas van Leyden and the German Little Masters. In 2011, she founded “The Morning Bark”, a bloGazette on arts and humanities, where she posts about arts with a multidisciplinary path, including fine arts, books, fashion, and contemporary jewellery.