Antonio Mazzetti

What type of printing do you prefer?

Personally, I really appreciate printing on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper. The image on this surface takes on a unique “impalpable softness.”

What comes first, the idea or the fascination with the material? In other words, does the artistic/photographic project come first, or is it inspired by the techniques and particular processes that strike you?

The choice of printing type is complementary to the type of support on which to print and the type of finishing that will be applied later.

Generally, the work is created without first considering the medium on which it will be printed, unless they are commissioned works with a pre-established location. 

In this case, the project is developed with the type of printing and the support on which it will be created in mind.

Do you have any Masters you look up to and feel close to?

The painter I look up to is Giambattista Tiepolo and closer to the present day is Rauschenberg, while my soul is turned to Caravaggio.

At Newlab I saw some of his works in person, just before they were packaged and shipped.

I was so intrigued by his work, rich in references to classical literature but also to Asian cultures, that it immediately made me think of a wonderful essay, “Futuro del classico” by Salvatore Settis (ed.2004).

On page 117 Settis, based on the theories of Lévi-Stauss (French anthropologist, philosopher and ethnologist)

He writes: “…the rediscovery of the classical is not associated with a stable system of Western values ​​to be contrasted with the “others”; on the contrary, it is placed in series with the rediscovery of “other” cultures, in a crescendo that starts precisely from the classical, but extends to all civilizations, increasingly intertwining with elements of other cultural traditions.”

I then noticed his strong propensity to merge, in addition to different cultures, also the fields of Art and Design.

I therefore wondered whether his attention towards the latter could be a return to the concept of Functional Art, typical of the classical period and of those artistic styles that have drawn inspiration from it throughout history, in which “making Art” was inextricably linked to commissions from patrons, municipalities, emperors, popes and architectural works, thus reconciling the figure of the Artist and that of the Designer, so distinct in Bruno Munari’s description in his book “Artist and Designer” (1971).

I don’t fully agree with the deep divide Munari draws between Artist equals imagination and   Designer equals creativity. I believe that creativity and imagination are two sides of the same coin. What we can only fantasize about today could be achieved tomorrow, as history teaches us. To support his thesis, he cites Dalí and his soft watches, but these are available on the market today. He also claims that with our imagination we can imagine a music that didn’t exist before, but once transcribed into notes and performed on musical instruments, it exists and has therefore been created.

The line between fantasy and creativity is too thin to be so clearly separated; the latter is the continuation of the former.

Future projects?

My next project is a foray into sculpture.