When and how have you decide to become an artist?
I became an artists as a little kid, when I realized that drawing was a way to pass through a difficult illness that almost took my life. I spent days and hours just drawing and drawing. However, I guess your question goes towards the professional decision to devote to art as a career. This happened around 1996, when studying architecture I started doing site-interventions with fellow students friends, in specific contexts of the city. I was fascinated by making art and I was taking lots of B&W photos which I developed on my own black room. I had to take a conscious decision – just after graduating – to quit the job I had as a student in an architecture studio to support myself, if I wanted to be an artists: I had to embrace the full time to only do that and to just jump into it with all I had. I became an artist when I decided to do so, becoming an artist is an act of will.
Who are the artists you are mainly inspired by?
Those that trigger your mind and your emotions, the ones who create their own universe and expand artistic language. Artists who because of them, Art never ceases to evolve. I have been inspired by many artists over the years, it would practically be impossible to name them all. But of course, some come to mind irrefutably. Jannis Kounellis, Luciano Fabro, Lygia Clark, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Dan Graham… I’m an big art admirer, so I try to see as many as shows as possible, everywhere I go and I also get inspired by my peers. Artists such as Anri Sala, Pierre Huyge…whom I´ve seen very moving shows in the recent 2-3 years.
You are working with many different materials, which are your emblematic ones?
I think my work is often related to concrete blocks and tie-downs, but if you look carefully you would find also a strong presence of rocks, marble in its raw state and glass sheets. I’m very interested in the communication between industrialized materials and primitive ones. In China, Brazil, France, etc… you are able to find metal beams of same proportions and width, glass to the same thickness, wood cut in the same shape, this is a human convention. It’s a way to democratize materials and to make people who uses these materials for construction purposes communicate more easily. While marble or a stone, for example, are always unique, there are never two equal, just like a finger print or like a sea shell.