We recently connected with Astolfo Maria Cicerano and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Astolfo Maria thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

When I was little I liked to draw all the plants and animals in my grandfather’s garden, I made my own colors by extracting pigment from the plants and I have continued to have this relationship with the surrounding reality until today, it’s what I’ve always felt like doing.

Astolfo Maria, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My artistic work is very varied, I play with different materials but essentially in recent years I have focused on working with cardboard and industrial iron. I appreciate simple, everyday materials, for example I work with cardboard in such a way that, seen from a distance, it appears to be a piece of wood. In this type of work I like the fact of seeing the root of a material of little value, so through careful procedures there seems to be a return to the original material, wood. With iron, however, I work through oxidation, promoting rust, which is nothing other than cancer of the iron. I like to bring into being some more or less ancient symbols, underlining a poetics of destruction, where in this case rust, which is considered something dirty or old, I can transform it giving it a pleasant effect, and so what is destroying the iron sheet is also producing something beautiful.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Being an artist for me means working on life, and when you premeditate and create a form, a part of yourself will be inserted into it.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

The constant search to find satisfaction in one’s work, even if it always seems to be a little more distant with every job done, as if one had the sensation of wanting to fill a vase that never gets full, so this pushes me to do a another step.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.astolfomaria.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/astolfo_maria/