A Milanese artist narrating his personal form of art creation using iconic language and giving life to real and fantastic zoomorphic sculptures.
Forty years old, grown up in Milan hinterland in a family of artists, with his father being a painter, his mother a tailor and the two sisters, film director Cristina and producer Serena: this stimulating family context has inspired Mauro Seresini to develop the skills and taste to make paper sculptures of any kind, all of them hand-made. «I remember the strong smell of oil painting and the nights when I used to watch my father paint», remembers Seresini, who recalls how he has always been led by the desire to create something with his hands. After dropping off school, this passion led him to work in the most varied professions, ranging from mechanic to electrician, and from light engineer to stylist assistant. His curiosity and ambition then led him to enter the art and set designing world, thereby highlighting yet another perspective. This was the start if his adventure in the world of art, which has led him to collaborate with most renowned photographers, advertising agencies and editorial staffs, thereby making use of varied materials and trying through them to shape his own thoughts. The result have been creations that do not represent static objects, but rather feature real stories and fairy tales.
Finding oneself again
The self-taught artist Mauro is proud to tell us his story and describe the moment when he understood that he had to guide his manual skills towards their original direction: «I drew my strongest inspiration from the moment when I literally fled the workshop where I was working as a mechanic. I understood that eight hours “alone” were not enough for me and couldn’t make me happy. So I started making works of art while I was still working as a mechanic», adds Mauro, «and during the working hours I would secretly make my sculptures by using the materials I had in front of me. Following the same principle, I started bending and gluing paper, too». He built upon his experience, yet he drew inspiration from leading reference personalities in the art field, like Alexander Calder, René Magritte and obviously his father Adriano Seresini.
Why paper among all materials?
Working paper requires manual ability and meditation: poor and complex at the same time, paper can be 3-D, 2-D or more simply give shape to one’s thoughts. All paper, without exceptions: recycled, coloured, white, of any coat weight, colour, finish, because «you decide on the spur of the moment what paper is the most suitable one».
Between tangible and intangible values…
Measuring, carving, cutting, bending, modelling, fixing and mounting: this is high-precision artisanal work, with the use of very sharp blades, surgeon’s scalpels, hot glue, double coated tape, pins and, with a little bit of imagination, «bat’s wings and snake’s teeth», says Seresini seriously. This is absolutely true, because imagination is an ingredient that cannot be renounced, it is the engine of all the rest, thanks to which «the 2D sheet of paper is turned into a sculpture and gets new shapes, acquires volume and dominates the space, challenging space and time».
Fashion and beyond
Seresini has produced several works of art, ranging from different sectors and involving leading advertising and editorial agencies. The most valued areas include fashion, with works done for major haute couture companies like Valentino, Tod’s, Fendi and Etro. Besides paper sculptures, over the years Seresini has specialized also in the creation of art video clips, which reflect the dynamic nature of his works of art or even evoke it: a Singapore bank commissioned him with the creation of a «video made with the stop-motion technique, resembling a real origami, but which is in fact made with joints enabling fluid and perfectly controlled movements».
Origin of the characters
Let’s now talk about the characters inhabiting the imagination and the artworks of Mauro Seresini: they are suspended dynamic shapes, whose boundaries lead to a dreamy dimension that finds inspiration in any place: «inspiration stems from anything that surrounds me – from my partner, from my family, from beautiful things in general». And like all fairy tales worth this name, also Mauro Seresini’s ones have a beginning and an end, in an eternal creativity play taking place in a space-time dimension that is blurred and only apparently defined.
[metaslider id=1981]