Unique works, like shadows and light in memory

In the era of industrial production and globalisation, restoring individuality and artistic quality to items for everyday use represents a return to the age-old tradition of production of unique items.

Wengè, iroko, oak, and CORIAN®, Tyvek®: rare, exotic woods appear alongside quality European woods and materials of the new generation in the products of Remo Zanin, an artist, craftsman and designer of the new millennium. Zanin, who began his career in 1988 and formed a partnership with Nunzia Vecchione in 1990, creates some of Italy’s most interesting woodwork. His products are the stuff of memory, citations of distant worlds dictated above all by the natural characteristics of the materials he chooses with an emotional rationalism: totem-sculpture-objects offered in a version for suggestively simplified spaces. A type of work which is close to the arts and crafts movement, but replaces its passion for the epic and for the traditional crafts of the Middle Ages with a love of travel, poetic reflection, nature, handmade forms – even the most distant – and, above all, love of the sea. It is his attraction to the sea and to the dunes of Sabaudia, where he still has his workshop – a space in which even the tools and instruments of his craft are reinvented for each piece of work – that underlies Zanin’s interest in wood and in the organic forms of objects.

The theme of light flows into his work in a somewhat disarmingly natural manner in a series of light fixtures with surprisingly sinuous forms, inspired by the play between light and shadow which their lines form in rooms. Their names offer a foretaste of an almost contemplative conception of daily living: “Migrations”, “Digressions”, “Taha”. The collection of lights has been expanded with the addition of works of art – items with no evident function other than dialogue with the space surrounding them – tables in a wide range of shapes and sizes and console tables with tapered legs, like memories of distant elephants’ tusks, incorporating elements of CORIAN© worked with a scalpel, as if it were stone or particularly hard wood, in the ancient tradition of crafts and sculpture. Zanin’s works have appeared in a number of exhibitions, the most recent of which was “Le Stagioni del Legno” held in Rome’s Temple of Hadrian in October, and appear in galleries and spaces dedicated to design and unique items such as Amalgama in Milan or Ex-Ante in Rome. For information, Remo Zanin may also be contacted directly...

Maria Vittoria Capitanucci