TOWARDS NEW PERSPECTIVES IN CONTEMPORARY ART
Verter Turroni – 1965 – is an Italian artist and designer, co-founder with Emanuela Ravelli of imperfettolab. The verb “to work” (in its past participle form) has been placed in quotation marks precisely to more strongly highlight this artist’s industriousness, his indispensable manual skill, his full adherence to the act of creation which, in the potential of matter, finds no inertia but rather a life that emerges between action and non-action. A primitive movement, this, which is also a struggle for control of the process, whether it be an oxidation or an imprint does not matter, because his way of proceeding is a phenomenological machine that does not fully submit to the vision of the one who operates. Marco Bazzini, in “Il risveglio dell’angelo” (critical text).
HOW DID YOUR PASSION FOR ART ORIGINATE, AND HOW DID YOU DECIDE TO MAKE IT THE CENTER OF YOUR LIFE, TURNING IT INTO A PROFESSION? I believe that what first nourished my passion for art and for my work was the environment of the home where I was born and raised. My father was a painter, and painting was a natural presence, together with the paintings and art books that inhabited the spaces as something essential. The fact that my brother also became an artist is, for me, a further confirmation of that family condition: it is not something we chose, but a language that grew within us, shared without the need for explanations.
Art became a profession for me at the moment I realized that this pursuit was not separate from life, but rather my most precise way of experiencing it.
HOW DO YOU TRANSFORM AN IDEA OR A “SIMPLE” SKETCH ON PAPER INTO A SCULPTURAL WORK? For me, the sketch is never preparatory. It is not a project, nor an obligatory step towards sculpture. It is rather a gesture of pause, a form of light concentration. I work continuously with both sight and hands; form is built through making, correcting, and looking again. The drawings retain an experience of form, a passage of vision.
WHAT ROLE DOES INTUITION PLAY IN THE WAY YOU CHOOSE, COMBINE, AND MAKE MATERIALS DIALOGUE WITHIN YOUR WORKS? Intuition, for me, is central: it is a form of silent intelligence, built over time, after more than thirty years of work. When I speak of “intuition,” I mean that ability to immediately recognize a possibility. First I observe, at length, and then the hands translate what the eyes have already begun to understand. It does not arise from emptiness: it comes from the habit of looking, from continuous making, from having learned to sense where a material can go and where it resists instead.
YOUR CREATIONS EVOKE ORGANIC FORMS AND PRECARIOUS BALANCES. WHAT INSPIRES YOU MOST? I am inspired by what has crossed time without losing its mystery. Archaeology and history have taught me to read forms as traces: fragments that carry within them a use, a ritual, a layering. My works are born there, at that point where an artifact and an organism seem to speak the same language: that of matter which resists, changes, and continues to tell its story.
WHEN YOU START A PROJECT, DO YOU BEGIN WITH THE IDEA OF CREATING A FUNCTIONAL ART OBJECT, OR DO YOU FIRST CREATE A BEAUTIFUL FORM AND THEN THINK ABOUT ITS USE? “As a designer I start from an idea of use and context, with the need for the object to be recognized and desired. Compromise is part of the craft: I do not experience it as a renunciation, but as an intelligent negotiation with reality. I never define one of my design projects as a work of art. Design remains a territory with its own rules, a place where form must find a way to inhabit and be inhabited, not only to assert itself. When I work as an artist, I do not seek compromises: expression is free, it does not need to please, it does not need to function. They are two different but communicating attitudes: the designer carries the artist within him, and the artist keeps alive the rigor of the designer. It is in this ambivalence that I manage to move without betraying either side of myself.”
WHAT CHALLENGES DO YOU FACE AS A DESIGNER IN MAKING EACH OBJECT UNIQUE FOR COLLECTORS AND INTERIOR DESIGNERS? “The main challenge is to keep uniqueness alive without turning it into a stylistic device: my collection exceeds ninety pieces, and each new object must add something, without repeating itself and without betraying a language built over time. When I started, in 1997, collectible design in the world of furniture and interiors was not yet a recognized path as it is today. The collection has been able to grow thanks to forward-thinking collectors and interior designers who believed in me. The challenge is to remain radical and independent, yet capable of engaging in dialogue with those who choose our pieces: listening to the context, without losing the direction of the research.”