Federico Vecchi

about the artist

Federico Vecchi experiments with the traditional techniques of drawing, painting and sculpture. Often however, they mesh with each other in such a way that the boundaries between them become blurred. Vecchi’s sculptures are to be situated «between sculpture and painting»1. This becomes apparent in the series formaunica in particular. The series of plaster sculptures was created between 2017 and 2018. The fact that Vecchi already adds colour when preparing the plaster betrays a pictorial approach: the material is subordinated to the experience of colour. The colour serves as a link between form and material and breathes life into them. After setting the finished casts are painted with diluted acrylic paint. The chromaticity, the contrast between primary, secondary and tertiary colours makes the sculptures pulsate. It emphasises the life force which is already moulded into the biomorphic plaster forms. In this one can see an allusion to the ancient notion that the ideal of liveliness is directly related to the colouring. Of course, what matters for Vecchi is not the mimesis but the poiesis, the creation of a living aura: the sculptures are surrounded – to use a term from the renaissance – by an aria that brings to light an undefined likeness between natural and art objects. This occurs by projecting organic properties onto the abstract texture of the sculptural surfaces. In Vecchi’s sculptures as in nature, random shapes evocative of figurative elementsncan be recognised. However, this happens only in the act of beholding. The beholder’s gaze seems to actively take part in shaping the transformable matter.