Rilievo

For a long time, people believed the mind mattered more than the body. The body was seen as a machine, the senses as servants. Science, art and design followed this thinking, and paid less and less attention to what the body feels. Modern technology pushed it further, until living without calm felt normal. Architecture and design slowly lost their human touch. They served function and reason, but forgot the very people who use them, and their need for calm in body and mind.

This is why my art has long grown from my own research: a search for forms that bring people back to inner calm. Its roots lie in relief art, and especially in one moment. In the mid-1930s, Europe was darkening between the two world wars. Economies were in crisis, fascism was rising, and London filled with painters who had fled the continent. In that city, white geometric reliefs began to appear. They gave people still, ordered surfaces where the eye could rest in a time of turmoil. In my eyes, angular forms like these speak of calm.

Many thinkers now agree that this numbness, the mind in charge and the body used to living without calm, has played a part in the sense of isolation, the inner emptiness and the illness so common in modern societies. This puts an urgent task in the hands of artists and designers: to help us feel calm in the world again. That is why Rilievo uses the relationship between geometry and stillness of mind as a bridge between the body and the mind. In the end, it nourishes the whole person.

Rilievo's bars, squares and a quarter circle, cut as solid blocks, rise from the flat ground of the panel. A grain as fine as sand scatters the light across them. Each raised edge gives the light a place to rest. There, light meets matter.

While designing Rilievo, my first piece of wall art for The Soft Minimal, I studied how it could grow inseparable from the senses of whoever lives beside it, and from the simple experience of being alive. It had to bring its owner, and anyone who pauses before it, back into themselves: here, in this room, in this hour, among the things that are special to them. For that, the senses have to work as one. In front of a relief, the eyes lead, the hand follows, and then the whole body joins in, turning countless small signals into one instant reading of the room and a response to it.

When Rilievo becomes yours, the first thing I want it to do is receive the whole mood of the place you live in, with its light and its shadow. You can feel the light move, hour by hour, over the soft, sand-like grain of the panel. And the shadows are the part I love most. They gather softly beneath the raised edges and stretch out as evening comes. The room seems to slow down with them.

The craftspeople who make Rilievo with me need the same understanding I do: how the senses join forces to study each form, its outline, its surface, its weight and how it takes the light. They also need a full knowledge of relief, an ancient craft, built from what the senses gather, first in the body and only later in the mind. Rilievo's blocks and lines lean on one another, and together they call on several senses at once: the present meets a memory, a still form meets movement, a texture meets a feeling.

I believe the skill to feel this has been with us since birth, and that in time it teaches us where our inner world ends and the world outside begins. Rilievo helps you notice the quiet pleasure of a body at ease with some materials and some rooms, and the unease that other places can stir. Over a lifetime, these meetings between body and place settle into memory, and from them each of us builds a feeling of comfort, of safety, of home.