Interview with Edoardo Tresoldi: the beauty of figurative sculptures

Born in 1987, Edoardo Tresoldi grew up in Milan where, at the age of 9, experimented different languages and techniques under the guidance of painter Mario Straforini. In 2009, he moved to Rome and started working in various creative areas. Cinema, music, scenography and sculpture gave him a heterogeneous vision of arts and became a platform for experimentation.

Since 2013, he has performed public space interventions, focusing his research on genius loci and the study of landscape elements. His works have been featured in public spaces, archaeological contexts, contemporary art festivals, music festivals and group shows.

In 2016, he carried out, together with the Italian Ministry of Culture, the restoration of the Basilica Paleocristiana of Siponto, a unique convergence between contemporary art and archaeology.

Edoardo Tresoldi plays with the transparency of mesh and with industrial materials to transcend the time-space dimension and narrate a dialogue between Art and World, a visual summary which reveals itself in the fade-out of physical limitations.

Mixing classical and modern language, he generates a third one, strongly contemporary.

Where did you get the idea of designing transparent sculptures?

Edoardo Tresoldi:

“I worked for seven years in Rome as a scenographer for Cinema and TV and often the set design structures’ were made of wire mesh. I was really fascinated by its narrative potential and its capability to let me draw in the air, and I started to conceive experimentations on the relationship between the human body and space, and then figurative sculptures.

Also thanks to the incitements of my friend and Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo, I decided to quit the work as a scenographer and begin my artistic research.”

In the time of virtual and augmented reality, you bring to life tangible illusions. Is there any link between the three? What is your opinion about the virtual extension we are living in today?

Edoardo Tresoldi:

“My poetics comes from reflections related to real life, but I recently started to make use of virtual reality for some project presentations. They are powerful technological platforms, more experiential than a simple rendering on a screen or a printed image, and can help to imagine and visualize how architecture will be outlined.

By maintaining a perceptive connection with real dynamics, virtual reality allows the immersive dimension of physical discovery and its subjectivity. This makes it more interesting than usual technological tools.”

What are your goals when creating a new structure? How do you get your inspiration? And how do you know you reached them?

Edoardo Tresoldi:

“To grasp the essence of the places and celebrate the dialogue between their diverse elements and man, building a contemporary language, is the main focus of my research.

When I’m able through my works to generate the experience of wonder and a dream-like dimension, united in a single, ephemeral unity that places itself as a breaking moment of everyday life, I know I’ve reached my goal.

I let myself be inspired by a vast range of things: talking with people, Nature, and contemporary landscapes, immerse myself into places that can have an unexpected poetics.”

In which ‘landscape’ would you like to build your next masterpiece? Why?

Edoardo Tresoldi

“I’d like to realize an intervention within the desert. It is a place with a strong natural spiritual dimension, and an essential relationship between the elements.

Few nuances and transitions that make you seem to be a part of a bigger entity, in which everything has a precise meaning, with a single line of horizon that divides, or join, Earth and sky.”