Body and identity lie at the heart of the artistic research of Erich Turroni, sculptor and painter, born in 1976.
\n\u201cIn painting I like being able to work with transparencies and overlays, creating rarefied, enigmatic images. What interests me is the missing mark, the void that lies within and around\u201d.
\nWhat element or elements have most influenced your works?
\nI believe everything starts from the body, understood not as a subject to portray 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 can never see in its entirety. This is why my images resemble X-rays, passages of density, where the imprint and the gesture emerge as physical, residual traces of its passage, rather than as recognisable figures.<\/p>\n
What is the path from a visionary idea to a work?<\/strong><\/em> What guides you in developing the initial sketch?<\/strong><\/em> Among the imperfections of materials, which do you consider the most \u201cmagical\u201d, able to stimulate your creativity?<\/strong><\/em> How does place influence your choice of the city and space in which you would imagine an installation, and what characteristics should it have to enter into dialogue with the work?<\/strong><\/em>
\nThe concept at the root of my work lies in the continuous exchange between drawing and sculpture. Sometimes a sculpture is born from an earlier drawing \u2013 drawings I consider true paintings \u2013 and at other times the opposite happens: I make the sculpture first and draw inspiration from it for two-dimensional works. It is a constant dialogue, a circulation of forms with no defined starting point.
\nI never start from a \u201ccomplete\u201d idea. I prefer the image to build up progressively, through layering and cross-references between one medium and another.
\nIf there is such a thing as \u201cvisionariness\u201d, for me it is the ability to accept that the image remains partial, displaced, never definitively closed.<\/p>\n
\nOften the sketch is not a beginning but a late trace, a form of recording. I draw when I sense that an inner image risks becoming too defined: the mark on the paper helps me contradict it, to keep it open.
\nI am not guided by the desire to \u201cfix\u201d a form, but to test its fragility. In this sense the void \u2013 the unsaid, the untraced \u2013 counts as much as the line. I am interested in what is missing: the edge I don't close, the figure that doesn't fully reveal itself, the part that remains off-frame. The sketch is where I test how far the image can hold out without giving in to over-explanation.<\/p>\n
\nWorking with synthetic and industrial materials, the most interesting \u201cmagic\u201d is always the one that escapes control: an air bubble, an unexpected haze, a micro-fracture in the surface.
\nI don't consider these imperfections as errors to be corrected, but as entrances, points where the material stops being neutral and begins to suggest something I hadn't foreseen. I am more interested in what cracks than in what works perfectly.
\nThe surfaces of my paintings are embedded in layers of resin that are rarely smooth: during the making process small \u201cmishaps\u201d often emerge that mark their skin. They are traces I don't fully control and that I consider a living part of the work, as if the surface were breathing and recording its own making.<\/p>\n
\nFor me every place has its own soul, something that filters into the creative process and inevitably steers it: this is why I would imagine the installation in a space able to resonate with the work, a spiritual place, even a forest, where the environment itself becomes an active part of the work.
\nAs for the city, rather than a capital I would imagine a frontier place, where the boundary between above and below, between visible and invisible, is already inscribed in the geography.<\/p>\n