TOWARDS NEW PERSPECTIVES IN CONTEMPORARY ART
The body and identity are at the core of the artistic research of Erich Turroni, sculptor and painter, born in 1976.
“In painting I like the possibility of working with transparencies and through layering, creating rarefied and enigmatic images. What interests me is the missing mark, the void that lies within and around.”
What element or elements have most influenced your work?
I believe everything starts from the body, understood not as a subject to be portrayed but as a field of tension: identity, memory, desires. The body is the first landscape we inhabit and, at the same time, the first mystery we are unable to see in its entirety. For this reason, my images resemble X-rays more than representations, transitions of density, where imprint and gesture emerge as physical, residual traces of a passage, rather than as recognizable figures.
What is the process for transforming a visionary idea into a work of art?
The concept underlying the genesis of my work lies in the continuous exchange between drawing and sculpture. Sometimes a sculpture is born from a previous drawing, drawings that I consider true paintings, while at other times the opposite happens: I create the sculpture first and then draw inspiration from it for two-dimensional works. It is a constant dialogue, a circulation of forms with no clearly defined starting point.
I never begin with a “complete” idea. I prefer the image to build itself progressively, through layers and cross-references between one medium and another.
If there is such a thing as “visionariness,” for me it is the ability to accept that the image remains partial, displaced, never definitively closed.
What guides you in developing the initial sketch?
Often the sketch is not a beginning but a belated trace, a form of recording. I draw when I sense that an internal image risks becoming too defined: the mark on paper serves to contradict it, to keep it open.
I am not guided by the desire to “fix” a form, but to test its fragility. In this sense, the void, the unsaid, the unmarked, matters as much as the line. I am interested in what is missing: the edge I do not close, the figure that does not fully reveal itself, the part that remains out of frame. The sketch is the place where I test how far the image can hold without giving in to an excess of explanation.
Among the imperfections of materials, which do you consider the most “magical,” capable of stimulating your creativity?
Working with synthetic and industrial materials, the most interesting “magic” is always what escapes control: an air bubble, an unexpected veil, a micro-fracture in the surface.
I do not consider these imperfections as errors to be corrected, but as points of entry, moments when matter ceases to be neutral and begins to suggest something I had not foreseen. I am more interested in what cracks than in what works perfectly.
The surfaces of my paintings are embedded in layers of resin that rarely turn out smooth: during the making process, small “inconveniences” often emerge and mark the skin of the work. These are traces I do not fully control and that I consider a living part of the artwork, as if the surface were breathing and recording its own becoming.
How does a place influence your choice of the city and the space in which you would imagine an installation, and what characteristics should it have to enter into dialogue with the work?
For me every place has its own soul, something that filters into the creative process and inevitably guides it. For this reason, I would imagine the installation in a space capable of resonating with the work—a spiritual place, even a forest—where the environment itself becomes an active part of the artwork. As for the city, rather than a capital I would imagine a border place, where the boundary between above and below, between visible and invisible, is already inscribed in the geography.