It’s fair to say that New York City’s modern art scene has seen it all. An Italian artist is on a mission to disrupt this reality with his invention of a brand new medium.
Federico Vezzaro spent 15 years developing a way to imprint designs onto metal sheets by exploiting surfaces’s natural oxidation process. The result: rust. Yesterday, in Brooklyn, he revealed his works to the American market at his first international exhibition: Carminium
“I started from the basics of this process, so it’s full of mistakes, failures, messes,” said Vezzaro. Eventually, he reached a degree of chemical stabilization after years of experimenting with samples, which he chose to bring to the exhibition for guests to go through. Every finished piece displayed on the walls, he says, was created within the past few months.
Most of Vezzaro’s pieces are simple. His designs range from naturally-occurring patches of rust to lines and circles. For Vezzaro, it’s all about the medium: “I wanted something that was direct, not mediated, not reworked, which expresses the strength that is inside the matter, its energy.”
Vezzaro’s favorite piece is a vertical canvas displaying lines of rust that resemble morse code. When asked if it has a title, he shakes his head: “Names are reductive.” Instead, said Vezzaro, he assigns a five-digit code taken from the Fibonacci Sequence to each work of art. “Since the golden ratio is infinite but tends towards perfection, the more I make, the closer I get to perfection.”
Drawing through rust, however, wasn’t always Vezzaro’s ticket to perfection. He began his career as a furniture designer specializing in bio-construction, the use of sustainable and eco-friendly materials. “His passion for using natural raw materials often led him to develop his own formulations for paints and finishes,” states Vezzaro’s biography.
The experience is what enabled him to engineer his unique rust stabilization technique, which enables him to preserve his designs, preventing natural deterioration. The process is based on the use of acid and involves about 30 steps depending on the desired hue.
The pieces’ “true identity comes from the aggression of the acid. A true act of violence,” explained Vezzaro of the meaning behind his process.
Vezzaro hopes his exhibition will enable people to see the possibility of creating something beautiful from something unremarkable. “Iron is a humble thing, which one doesn’t even think has this intrinsic value,” he said.
One thing’s for certain: nobody else in New York City’s art scene can do what he does. Now that the floodgates have been opened, Vezzaro hopes his pieces will attract the desired attention: “Seeing this sedative process, the colors being expressed in this violent and rude way, is very interesting.”