Biography

I have devoted myself for sixteen years to the various aspects of woodturning both as a business and an art form, I have always found it as a personal way to research a balance between my inner shapes and what nature communicates to me. This connection between human and nature is the real driving force of all my production today. 

My work starts exploring the physical aspect of the material in order to find the shape in which both we can emerge and express ourselves together. I am constantly looking for how a form can interact, share, and fill the space around it and how its presence can achieve a meaning in it. My works are a direct reflection of my personal experience through all those elements of culture, literature, music and figurative arts that my spirit feeds on.

Today I spend most of my time drawing and expressing myself in the making of contemporary artworks such as vessels and hollow forms, but I also continue to devote myself to the creation of unique furniture items and other sculptural pieces. Apart from that I take some time out to teach through individual classes. 

A BRIEF RETROSPECTIVE

I have been working with wood since the early 2000. I studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence and subsequently Philosophy at the University of Florence. During those years I spent most of my time sculpting and exploring various materials such as wood, marble and stones. 

I participated in various collective exhibitions between 1999 and 2005. In 2005 I had the opportunity to show my first large project in a solo exhibition. In the same year I bought an old lathe and I started to turn wood on my own. I then entered as an apprentice in a cabinet making company. This training period determined my choice to concentrate all my future research only around wood.

During my working career I have collaborated with companies, shops, private customers, creating almost everything, from serial production of object, bowls, cutting boards, to large-scale works such as columns, spheres, benches and tables. 

In 2015 I was asked to design and realise my first public project, the new Altar for the Church of Santa Croce in Vinci, Italy and the next year the Ambon to be placed in the same church. In 2018 I was committed for another sculptural Altar for a church in Ghiffa, Verbania, Italy.

EARLY WORKS

Between 2003 and 2005 I created several works by combining recycled wood, which I personally recovered at night in the urban environment, with photographic prints. These works took part in two different exhibitions in Florence and then in a wide solo exhibition from September to November 2005 at the Roccascalegna Castle, Chieti, Italy.

SARX AND LOGOS

During 2015 an 2016 I completed an Altar and afterwards an Ambon for the Church of Santa Croce in Vinci, Firenze, Italy. The works were both carved out of a large single block of olive wood. The inspiration came from the Gospel of John, from which I excerpted some verses and then engraved them on the works themselves. For both I avoided inserting figurative elements for specific reasons: the first was the need to represent abstract concepts, the second was to merge man and nature, in a partnership that at the same time could express the need to bring the human being closer to the divine by eliminating that separation built by history. The only figurative element appears in the central and lower section of the altar, a hand and a foot touching, a metaphor extrapolated from the Lavender of the Feet. Although simple at first glance, both works hide a large number of symbols linked to the Christian tradition.

THE GOLDEN RATIO

In 2018 I was asked to realise a new Altar in olive wood for the Church of Ghiffa, Verbania, Italy. Compared to my previous Altar, here the carvings were more figurative. The idea was to carve a large spread wings pelican referring to a middle age representation of the Christ. I found the inspiration through a research on ancient religious subjects, all referred to a Thomas Aquina’s composition, Adoro Te Devote, where the Christ was described as a mother pelican feeding her little baby pelicans with her own blood. Beside the figurative elements the work was throughout designed following a measurement scheme reflecting the Golden Ratio.

DIALOGUING WITH GREEN WOOD

Today I live and work in Abruzzo, Italy, near the Gran Sasso National Park. All my pieces are crafted from locally sourced green wood, harvested from fields of olive trees and oak forests near my shop. 

Green wood is a true living organism susceptible like us to the infinite variables of space and time, and as in every organism the smallest of the parts directly affects the whole, so in every single fiber of the wood lies the basis of any structure that I am going to shape, knowing it is to know what I am doing.

There is a huge difference between working with seasoned laminated wood and working with fresh wood. Since when I started working as a trainer, all my spare time I persevered where my heart took me, dedicating my personal research up this peculiar state of the material and looking for a personal way to manage it. 

Working green wood is a true unique world, where time really matters, all waiting and pauses are highly decisive, each aspect of the material has to be considered taking care of it, from its origin to the final result and most importantly all this knowledge has to suit my own skills. I understand that all of this is what I have invested years of research into, and what I am realizing today would not have been possible if I had not gone all that way.

Green wood also means that the wood has to be dried in order to be finished. For me the drying process is crucial, not only because the success of the work depends on it but also because it is there that the connection between me and the material is most unfolded, in that tension between the shape I have chosen and the ability of the wood to adapt to or adapt that specific form.