How do you describe your own art practice?
I often use the word “weaving”, it helps me to describe the literal and conceptual way I like to intend the work: a constellation of relations activated by the surfaces and volumes of the things, following the “haptic” gaze and tactile memories. Materials as canvas, oil colors and pigments, concrete, fabric, bronze are used together and the results of this dialogue embody narrative tensions, hidden in their own substance. Every process- manual, artisanal or industrial- brings with itself a story, a provenience, implications, so it becomes to me a matter of fact and a fluid starting point for achieving certain shapes. And this, sometimes, drives me also to question the temperament or empathy I would like to deal with. The works come out from a translation and, on doing that, I’m mostly interested in evoking rather than representing.
Which question or theme is central in your work?
The possibilities given by the coexistence of languages.
What was your first experience with art?
I remember I felt so good the day I was drawing at home the Cathedral of San Basilio, looking at the projection of the diapositive my father took during his travel in Moscow, in the early 90s. I enjoyed so much that moment as I realized how pleasant it was following the colors, the vivid volumes of those domes and transferred them through the consistency of the crayon in my notebook.
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
Right now, I would say I’m reading a lot about some tailoring approaches and their entanglements respect designing a dress in relation to the way our body may dwell and wear it. I’m attracted by natural postures, the way our legs or arms laying when we are relaxing or sleeping. I’m wondering, through the sculpture, how to record this kind of intimacy and unintentional choreography. The Jumpsuit Theme, my latest research, references the garment of a jumpsuit and the idea of a theme understood as a variation and improvisation on the construction principle, as inspired by two artists and stylists active in the early XX century: Ernesto Michahelles, alias Thayaht, the inventor of the so-called TuTa a T in 1919 and Madeleine Vionnet. Among the works composing the show, some sculptures are made in concrete and with pigments: with simple cylinders, used as modules, I created an abstraction of a jumpsuit. The soft form-works filled with concrete have delivered volumes of anthropomorphic postures. The Jumpsuit Theme is been conceived in two parts, Intermezzo and Camerino, which are on show now, displayed respectively at MART – Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto and at the Národní galerie Praha in Prague.
What do you need in order to create your work?
A good place where stay for a long time and project desires and fears. Besides the physical things, the involvement and the experience of what I learn, observe, read and feel. And the people, going back and forth, around you.
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
This one, fascinated me a lot: it’s Taryn Simon’s A Cold Hole on view last year at MASS MoCA. The gallery floor was replaced by a solid ice floor with a square hole in the center. Visitors and performers were invited to jump into the icy water below, and the work was seen through a cinemascope aperture from a darkened gallery aside from the room. Standing in front of this display, you were as in waiting for a scene, that maybe will come or just remains empty and silent in the moment you were in. I liked this intersection of physical and virtual action which provokes an intimate- or rather universal- desire: of being there and make the jump or feel an uncomfortable sense on doing that. I think is a lot to do with a double feeling and a double intention between who is in and who is out from there.
