Contemporary ornamentation reclaims meanings that consumer society, the product of mass industrialization and well-being, has erased. It can still be the favorite archetype of human thought and needs .
Contemporary experiments in the field of visual arts often become the cultural languages from which the goldsmith artist draws inspiration for his creations; while new technologies are the "new tools" that he "can use for his creative purposes" , overcoming the prejudice that considers the intervention of the machine and technology as a reason for the debasement of the artistic act. The Englishman David Watkins (1940), for example, director of the metals section of the Royal College of London, used, for the first time, twenty years ago, the computer as a design tool.
The relationship until now inseparable between the jewel and the human body, due to its fundamental nature of ornament, becomes more tenuous, so much so that contemporary jewelery is considered the protagonist of performances and installations .
To be able to wear these ornaments, one must have a more disenchanted, less conventional vision of life , one must be able to intuit hidden messages among things and to continue to marvel at the new and continuous stimuli that things themselves offer us. In this regard, I like to remember the current director of the Massana school in Barcelona, Ramón Puig Cuyás (1953), who knows how to transform relics of everyday life – pieces of metal, buttons, wood and stones – into a meaningful whole, like relics of time, condensations of stories to wear.
Contemporary jewelry is more “democratic” than traditional jewelry, as it can be worn by anyone who has a particular ability to freely interpret the art of adorning themselves. For example, once worn, a rigid paper necklace by Dutch artist Nel Linssen (1935) brings together the rich collector in search of an unusual, shocking piece of jewelry and the young girl who does not feel comfortable with a pearl necklace, but prefers to present herself to others with a delicate, natural and conceptual necklace, such as a paper necklace.
Contemporary ornamentation is an expression of one's singular personality and can hardly be a "family heirloom" that can be passed down from generation to generation because it cannot be worn by different people without changing its meaning and (ideal) value.