Low Relieves /

Family Portraits

“...and now, finally, wood! And yet I think wood is a special material: it carries me back to Mantua, where I was born and where I lived my infancy with my maternal grandparents, who adored me.
These were the best and the happiest years of my life.

My grandfather was a genius and could make anything with his hands. There was nothing he could not work and turn into something better. It was only a hobby for him, but I still have some pieces of furniture he made. Wood was his passion, and he knew how to work it. From him I learnt to love this noble material and how to work it, and it was in the town where I began my 'work as an artist' by making my first dollies (not that different from the ones I make now) with bits of wood my grandfather used to give me and which I would hammer away at, building the precursors, the “ancestors” of the ones I am now displaying at the Venice Biennale...”

P.B., Venezia - 2011