Ivano Vitali  

 

I was born in the area of the Po Delta Park and I have always paid great attention to environmental issues. I have a long artistic path: my guiding light (Leitmotiv) is the belief that it is urgent and indispensable to make a contribution in order to save our ecosystem. Besides, I think that people's creativity should be expressed without harming man or environment, since nature is a wonderful gift, received when we are born, and we are committed to handing it over to future generations.
I started out as a sculptor but, since 1995, I decided to stop using traditional materials, and elected waste paper as the only medium for the realisation of my works. My latest creations, sometimes real fashion shows, have in common creative, playful and didactic aspects: I weave, knit, crochet, sew and point out the many expressive qualities that paper can produce. Also the balls of thread that I have been making since 2002 by twisting the strips of newspaper into thread, like the strips of newspaper which I ripped and threw in the air in the second half of the 70s, represent the continuation of my aesthetic language made of lines, colours, volumes and concepts.
Every ball of thread is created to be used for the making of garments, tapestries and objects; it is unique because - like an archive - it gathers stories, images and advertisements of the past; different in the colour and thickness of the thread that, on the surface, determines its graphics made of lines which intertwine; graphics which are much more evident in the works made by knitting plain and purl stitches, by crocheting in different ways, by weaving a fabric according to a certain texture, by sewing long or short stitches.
There are objects, which I install, garment-sculptures which I wear or let other people wear and that for their stiffness are reminiscent of tree bark or the armour of an old warrior. All the processes are rigorously made by hand and so the time of creation, both of the thread and the knitwear, becomes inevitably long.
The results I obtain vary also for the quality of the paper, its weight, if it is glossy or not, for the colour, the printed words and the images contained. Objects, tapestries and knitwear nearly always have mèlange colours.
In order to be faithful to my environmental commitment I don't add colours at all and the only colours I use are those I find in printed paper: sometimes the background is already coloured, other times I select pages of advertisements with a certain colour, which I then transform into balls. Neither water nor any type of glue is used in the making of the thread, which is built by just overlapping and twisting the two ends of the paper strips.I avoid using glue because the thread would lose softness and elasticity and, by drying, it would create corners difficult to be knitted. Besides it would break more easily when bent.
Every object, like every other paperwork, cannot be exposed to the rain or the sun or be put in a place which might be too damp. Another characteristic: when getting old, paper acquires a yellowish colour, since a lot of substances used to whiten the printed paper fade away together with smells; now paper, with its warm nuances, reminds us where it comes from.
For all these characteristics my works are precious.

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