My stage as an (almost) full-time sculptor began in 1988 with a terracotta piece inspired by a drawing for which my mother posed. But a bearded man came out of it instead, screaming in anguish. He seemed alive and the hand that supported his head was like that of a human being, pulsating with life, astonishing.
From that day on I never looked back. Never again.

Soon my insatiable curiosity pushed me to explore other paths using different languages, as it happened throughout my career up to the present. From the hands that shape the clay to the fusion of poor metals, then increasingly noble, to the liquefied glass that fills the plaster cast, to the chisel stuck into the dry trunks of Swiss pine or while it scratches hard blocks of mountain stone. Then the fabrics sewn together with nails and bolts, the polychrome terracotta, the mosaics and the mixed-media experiments, until the day when, in front of an abandoned wooden board, I had an intuition.
I was working as an assistant for the artist Giuliano Melioli, founder of Tarsie, Architecture and Furnishings in Polychrome Terra Cotta and Mars Stones. I grabbed the grinder that I regularly used to smooth the surfaces of breathtaking terracotta panels and sank the blade into that seductive wood. First to clean it and make it a surface to paint on, removing years of sediment that had accumulated outside the workshop, the cobwebs at the corners of the frame, the nails that were sticking out halfway. Maybe once it was a door, or a part of a huge wardrobe. As the blade sank into the wood, its speed of rotation burned the surface, blackening it. If I stayed light on the piece, however, the true nature of that gentle wood emerged, restored to its pure splendor. So, I began to lightly ‘carve’ that abandoned piece of wood. The result was an astonishing ‘Modiglianesque’ portrait.