ANTON ASSANTI

The Dialect of Luxury Tile

SICILY

Our story began toward the end of 1991in Trabia, Sicily when after working over fourteen years for major European porcelain houses, Anton Assanti opens his small studio out of several abandoned sheds on a property owned by his aunt.

After working alone for about one year, he invites his two cousins, a stone mason and a pasta maker to join him in the hand-making of porcelain tiles. What the two cousins lacked in artistic ability, they made up for with their passion, sacrifice and unwavering belief that their products created harmony and value wherever they are used.

The association quickly became a viable creative venture, where all ideas came together within the realm of free and unconventional thinking.

Since the late two thousand-eighteen, our still small studio moves forward with enthusiasm, innovation, and that same hard work ethic, all the while conserving the patrimony of our experience in the working of luxury tiles on the Monterey Peninsula, California. It's where John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Imogene Cunningham, and Ansel Adams found the inspiration to produce beautiful works for the world. It's truly a beautiful location full of history, natural wonders, and exquisite sunsets that enable aesthetic perfection and help to propagate free-thinking and good works.

Anton Assanti’s tiles are understated, timeless expressions of luxury, dismissive of mediocrity; delightfully whimsical, but always thoughtful. Even though we are now located on another continent, every activity in our studio follows the famous artisan traditions of Made in Italy, which ensure the highest quality and exclusivity of each creation by the Anton Assanti Studio.

THE STUDIO

The workmanship of the Anton Assanti Studio is borne from the traditions of Italian model makers and ceramicists who were passionate about exacting standards of artistry as witnessed in the graceful twists, turns, and textures of the individual designs.

By being a small studio, we are gifted with the freedom to operate in an uncomplicated fashion, that allows us to focus all our energy into artfully designed tiles having integrity, longevity and value.

How Our Tiles Are Made

Raw clay looking like ordinary garden soil is sifted and cleaned of earth debris, filtered, and then blended with water and other minerals to form a silky liquid mass termed 'slip.' Plaster molds are used to create an impression of the original tile that was once sculpted out of other special clays or sometimes wood.

Raw clay ready for cleaning and processing into slip.

Parts of the mold are assembled.

We decorate our tiles by hand, compounding and blending our glazes from powders of different colors and densities. However, some like precious gold or bronze originate from a unique liquid suspension that we import from Germany or Mexico. Those metals require utmost care in their preparation otherwise if they do not reach the precise temperature at the appropriate time, they will simply disintegrate in the immense heat of the kilns.

Decorating

Original Series Plaster Molds

Original plaster molds used between 1991- 1993

A Note About Plaster Molds

Patience is the key to making a plaster mold; it is really an art form all by itself. Today, little attention in fine art schools is paid to the correct design and engineering of plaster molds. A mold that is cleanly engineered to allow for all the pieces to fit snugly together so that the slip does not leak out, and when cured, the clay model can be easily and cleanly removed without damage, can take upwards of a week or more to build. The plaster used for molds is porous enough to allow the water in the slip to seep out in order to be able to handle and prepare clay models for the kiln. Molds that use a lot of water such as ours, can quickly deteriorate. They can start to fall apart after about two-hundred refills of slip, and that's pushing it. For this reason, when we build a mold, we don't just make one from the original model, we make three. Because the originally sculpted tile model can fall apart after the first mold, sometimes we make an impression
of the original out of alginate or urethane. A well-built mold allows for the very best of details from the original model to be imprinted into the clay slip.

This silky mass is then poured into plaster molds that serve
to form the design that was once produced by hand modeling.

FONDERIA

Now poured into the mold, the clay slip is agitated to release any air bubbles that may have been trapped in the slip before it solidifies. Trapped air bubbles within the clay can make for a brittle or incomplete tile after firing.