Fabriano
Returning to the Marche, where I was born, with an invitation to work inside Bar Luce and at the reception of Residenza La Ceramica in Fabriano felt like coming home for Christmas Eve dinner. You recognize the tablecloth, the dishes, the relatives, but you realize something has changed. A sense of disorientation the Germans call […]
Festone
In Offagna, where I was born, I transformed a stairwell into the theatre of a botanical infestation. It was the revenge of the festone, that ornament which art history has always confined to the frame and the frill, light and disengaged. Festone grows from a tiny window and spreads until it becomes a caryatid in […]
italiano in algeri
There is something subversive in the way Giacomo Serpotta elevates a humble material such as stucco (plaster, lime, and marble dust) to the level of the Baroque’s formal aspirations in his Palermo Oratories. This shift in material hierarchy − from marble, durable and glorious, to stucco, a far less noble substance − has long been […]
ecce grotta!
I have always thought that, even if the divine has no image, it may still have a place: a space capable of giving it a material presence. A place that, with the same abyssal depth as the highest heavens and the depths of the earth, could at once conceal it and reveal it. With this […]
Cake
With the cakes, my interest in the relationship between pastry-making and power takes on a performative dimension. The cake, as an object, becomes the occasion for a shared gesture: its cutting and its consumption. What remains of this action is a material trace — what is left of the cake — while what remains of […]
Fendi
For nine months, I worked on a site-specific project for the Fendi store on Via Montenapoleone in Milan, inside the building designed by Emilio Lancia, for which I designed the four foyer ceilings. The title I chose for the project, Walking through clear water in a pool painted black, is borrowed from an autobiography by […]
Talamo
Talamo is a modular installation, a wooden structure measuring approximately 118 x 49 inches, coated with pigmented concrete. The project originated from a transcription error I made in a notebook, while copying a passage from Gargantua about the Abbey of Thélème—an ideal architecture built without walls, where the motto is: Do what thou wilt. I […]
Qubbah
Qubbah is a site-specific project designed for the space of Masseria Cultura, in the Valle d’Itria. During a residence work, it has been brought to reality inside a seventeenth century construction made of dry stone. The typical, local, dry stone huts, trulli – in the shape of a square, topped by a keystone vault, under […]
Trapasso Tropicale
To visit a city one knows well can resemble a Via Crucis, not because it is painful, but because one retraces set stages as in a ritual. In Rome, I cannot miss Pietro da Cortona’s The Triumph of Divine Providence at Palazzo Barberini. Whenever I pass through Rome, I return to lose myself beneath that […]
Italian Villages project
There is nearly nothing nearby Sambuca di Sicilia. Located 89 km from Agrigento and 78 km south from Palermo, it barely counts 6000 people. It is considered one of the most beautiful small villages of Italy and now there is a reason more to go there. The 26 year old artist Edoardo Piermattei has been […]
Porziuncola
Though appreciating the habit of domesticating art to the point of being able to bear it in our hands before hanging it on our homes, the true nature of art invades and pervades the walls, from the ceiling to the floor. Painting hasn’t only played the part of architecture’s skin as the lining of the […]
Cremisaria
At first glance, as may have happened to some of the earliest and less attentive Venetian merchants, they appear to be red berries. They are, instead, precious insects clustered together: cochineal insects, from which the crimson pigment is extracted − the colour of the Venetian gonfalon. Cremisaria is a site-specific work conceived for the main […]