“I’m convinced that art is a continuous flow”
Tiziano Gilardoni was born in Italy in 1974 and is currently living in a small town near Milan. He is a self-taught artist who creates beautiful sculptures using modeling clay and plaster. Even though his favorite expressive medium is sculpture, he is also a talented photographer and painter.
After studying Gilardoni’s work, anyone can understand the value that this artist gives to lines, light, textures and emotions. He can capture images of the Uriezzo Gorges and make viewers admire nature’s composition or draw a nude female model and encourage people to praise her or sculpt a mermaid and arouse powerful feelings in the audience.
In this Q&A artist Tiziano Gilardoni shares with PoseSpace how he discovered sculpting, how Rodin influenced his work, who is his Art Model muse and how he explores different styles:
When did you first know you wanted to become an artist?
If I look back to my childhood I remember I took in my hand a brush earlier than a pencil. There is no precise time in my life when I decided that. When I grew up I attended technical studies but I never stop drawing and painting during my free time. Then there have been times in which I worked nonstop on many projects in parallel and times when I created very few works.
I’m not sure I’m an artist… of course, I produce something that could be addressed as pieces of arts in the common sense, but I think that this definition should have deeper implication in the social impact of the works, time will tell.
You draw, paint, sculpt and even do photography… how did you develop all of these artistic skills?
I used to be a self-taught painter and an amateur photographer until I decided to attend a part-time 2 year course at the Italian Institute of Photography in Milan (IIF). This gave me the motivation and the critical view to seek harder for the topics and the fields of expressions I really felt belonging to me. Then in the following three years I attended some courses in the local art academy to improve my technique in life drawing. And in the meanwhile I discovered sculpting, that has been literally a revelation: I’ve never considered that could fit my way of expression until the first time I modeled a piece of clay, and from then on I realized it was the most natural and comfortable way for me. It has been the real driver to study human anatomy.
I’m convinced that art is a continuous flow: after a while that I deal with the same subject or the same technique I feel that I’m becoming self-referential, therefore I try to focus on a different topic, to experience something new or I even jump from sculpting into photography or drawing. And each project has its proper language that best fit to it: one shall be expressed by drawing, another could only be represented by a statue, and a third can only be a black and white photo. In the end, I started developing some skills to find my way, now I try to learn new skills that could fit the ideas I have in mind.
Which artists have influenced you?
I saw the marble of The Kiss at an exhibition in Milan, I started turning around it and I would never stop… in that time I understood that Rodin would have been my reference for sculpting. Sculptors can be divided in two groups: those who create a statue with a main view, and those who think that all the point of views are equally important. Rodin belongs to the second, and me too. When I work on a figure I want it to communicate something from each point of view: as long as the observer turns around it he/she should find new details, a foreshortening that provide an impression never felt before, or an unfamiliar point of view that compel him/her to stop and look again, literally a physical journey around it.
And then I like the color and the technique of Redon, the “flat” fields of color of Gauguin, the portraits of Helmut Newton, the atmospheres of Jeff Wall and the high contrasts of Salgado.
Do you have a favorite PoseSpace model or product?
The one I used most is the pose set of Vaunt. I liked this shooting very much because the poses fit pretty well with the ideas I had in mind, both for sculpting and drawing. But I also have some paper book as
Do you have a favorite source of materials?
I like to go to exhibitions and look at the work of other artists, and I also look at art sites on the web. All these provide me suggestions and techniques for future experiments. But the ideas for my projects usually come from everyday life and go through a long process of sedimentation and rethinking, only when I have clear in mind what I want I finally start working.
How has your style changed over the years?
I like figurative art and even if sometimes I explore new combinations, I think I will remain linked to figurative topics. And I’m moving towards simplification, both in subjects and shapes. Looking back to the last years I know that I usually oscillate between “color” and “monochrome” times: I really like powerful colors, when I decide to work with then I privilege saturation and vividness, they really become the key point of the composition; then after a while I come back to the monochrome, especially when I use photography, it is a kind of catharsis to clean the mind from the resonance of colors and prepare myself for the next step.
Tiziano Gilardoni’s website: http://tizianogilardoni.weebly.com
Behance page: https://www.behance.net/tgilardoni7801
Interview by Andrea Miliani