My first experience as an editorial designer shaped my sense of composition more than my formal studies did. Working with grids, layouts, and visual hierarchies made me very sensitive to balance and spatial relationships. I became interested in how a small shift can change the whole rhythm of an image or a page. That attention to structure is still present in my work today, even when I’m using very different materials. I often think about composition as a set of relationships, where each element affects the others and creates a particular balance, pressure, or tension.

Graphic design taught me that nothing stands on its own. Every element changes depending on what is around it. Working with layouts and visual systems made me attentive to spacing, proportion, rhythm, and the role of empty space. It also trained me to think about context, sequence, and how a viewer moves through an image or an installation. That perspective still shapes the way I build work today. I’m often as interested in the spaces between things as I am in the things themselves.

I’m still drawn to many of the identity and pattern systems developed between the 1960s and 1970s because they feel active and still capable of movement. The work of Massimo Vignelli, for example, continues to resonate with me for its clarity and for the way it creates order without becoming rigid. I’m also fascinated by the modular and participatory approach of Bruno Munari, whose work leaves space for play, variation, and interpretation.

More generally, I’m interested in systems built from repetition, grids, and simple geometric rules. What keeps them alive is their ability to generate many different outcomes while still holding together. They give structure to the work, and within that structure unexpected relationships can appear. This has influenced my own practice. I often try to build visual systems that can shift, adapt, and produce new meanings over time.

The technique I use, combining wax, layers of acrylic, and torn applications of color, came out of a mistake. I did not arrive at it through a plan. Over time, that accident became a method, and I’m still testing what it can do.

When I started working on walls, I was looking for a medium that could suggest the passage of time without feeling forced. I wanted the material to have some agency, so the result would not be completely controlled in advance.

I’m drawn to surfaces where time is already visible: peeling walls, worn plaster, oxidized metal, faded pigments. Decay interests me when it accumulates slowly, when marks, damage, repairs, and layers start to read almost like writing.

I study these surfaces directly. I collect fragments and photograph urban walls, especially in places where layers overlap, interrupt each other, or partly disappear.

In the studio, I translate those observations through materials that behave in unstable ways. I’m not trying to reproduce aging as an image. I’m interested in its rhythm: time showing itself through change, friction, and loss.

For me, the difference is continuity. A surface worn by time carries traces of many processes at once: use, repair, exposure, neglect, care. None of them fully dominates. The changes build up through circumstance, weather, touch, and repetition, until the surface starts to feel accumulated.

Artificial distressing often gives itself away because the marks share one tempo. The damage can look too legible, too evenly distributed, too aware of itself as an effect. I’m drawn to something messier: interruptions, inconsistencies, and small contradictions that suggest a longer history and less control.

I’m interested in surfaces that do not resolve too quickly. You can sense different layers of time existing together, some exposed and some buried. That tension between visibility and opacity, construction and erosion, is what makes a surface feel alive to me.

What matters most to me is the search for a “perfect form,” even though I experience that search as impossible. I know it doesn’t really exist, and I still keep returning to it. Perfection, in this case, is temporary and specific. It depends on the moment, the place, and my own state of mind while I’m working.

The first irreversible step happens when I try to give that form a material presence. As soon as the idea becomes a gesture on the surface, it fixes itself in one direction. At the same time, it starts moving away from the image I had in mind.

After that, the process becomes a negotiation with that distance. The work keeps following the “perfect” image while also letting it go.

I’m interested in the quiet rules that shape how we recognize order, even when no one points them out: rhythm, repetition, deviation, hierarchy. We read these systems almost automatically. They guide how a composition is understood before we have time to name them.

Pattern lets me bring those rules closer to the surface without spelling them out. I’m interested in the point where order begins to loosen, where a small irregularity or shift makes the whole system more visible. A slight break can reveal that the structure was there all along.

For me, pattern is a way to look at perception in action. It shows how meaning builds through expectation, recognition, and interruption.

The most rational part comes at the beginning, when I’m building the structure. I think through the composition, the space, and the limits I want to set for the work. I usually start with an internal logic, almost a small set of rules around proportion, balance, and rhythm. There is a need to create order, even when that order is minimal or loose.

The irrational part starts once I begin working with the materials. Wax, acrylic, tearing, and removal all behave in ways I can’t fully predict. At that point, I’m no longer simply following the structure I had in mind. I have to respond to what the surface does, and to the small changes that appear while I’m working.

I’m interested in that passage from control to something less stable. The work begins with a rational frame, then slowly moves toward a more intuitive state. Some of the most important moments happen when the system starts to slip.

When I scale my work up to a mural or public wall, the first thing that changes is the relationship with time and perception. The work leaves the controlled scale of the studio. It has to deal with distance, movement, weather, light, and the surface of the wall itself. It also becomes part of a larger architectural and social situation.

That changes the way I build the image. Details become secondary to rhythm, structure, and overall balance. I have to think about how the work reads from far away, how it shifts as someone passes by, and how it responds to the wall’s imperfections, exposure, and light.

What I look for in craft collaborators is a way of working I cannot fully reproduce on my own: their feel for material, time, and gesture. My process often begins with a clear visual and structural idea, but collaboration brings in knowledge built through handling, repetition, and instinct.

I’m interested in how another person reads an instruction, how they solves material problems, and how their hands change the idea as it becomes an object. Those small shifts between intention and execution are important to me.

Collaboration lets the work pass through another way of thinking and making. Friction, translation, and even small misunderstandings can become part of the final result. That is what allows the work to move beyond what I could imagine or produce alone.

Modularity starts for me with a clear internal logic. I set up rules around proportion, rhythm, and relation, then leave enough room for the parts to shift. The modules work like a shared vocabulary. They belong to the same system, but they do not have to repeat exactly.

The work stays flexible through small differences: changes in scale, density, spacing, or the way a material behaves. Each element needs to hold its own place while still belonging to the larger structure. I’m interested in a field that feels coherent without becoming too uniform.

For me, modularity is a way to build a system that can stay open. The structure holds because the parts are allowed to move a little, change, and resist exact repetition.

Mostly various sessions from NTS Radio, especially funk and soul.

Hangar Bicocca, Milano.