Giuseppe Rivadossi

“I’ve seen wood being worked ever since I was a child. I’ve seen forests growing and trees of every size and type being felled. I saw my father turning their wood into wonderful barrels and lovely carts for the local farmers. Until twenty or twenty-five years ago, where I live now the relationship between men, and between men and nature, was still based on an ancient moral code. Then industry came along, and with it the plundering began. The hope of an easier life soon turned into a bitter reality.

The new technology that should have been only a tool for improvement turned out to be an instrument of frustration and general disintegration. Now in this situation I feel ever more deeply the need to express this feeling of unity at the base of existence, as an underlying idea that must not be lost, that must be found at all costs, every day and in everything. I consider the environment as a whole of nature and human intervention; the single work of art to which everything belongs and in which we all exist.

I believe that art is all the work of man and, speaking of my work (which I consider as what it is, a tiny part of the single work in which we all live and operate for good or for evil), I can tell you that I, like my father, began by making furniture and various objects in wood for my family. As I progressed I realised that these things really could be built according to deep and precise needs.

And so I found myself working on items of furniture whose appearance was increasingly in contrast with the environment, which was changing and becoming poorer as it deteriorated, and I realised that these objects of mine were taking on increasing significance, both in terms of construction methods and material used (wood). At that point I partially abandoned the function of containing for a different function.

And so I arrived at these most recent pieces, images in which the idea of a different way of living, of a living inside (inside life, inside life’s things) is pictured through structures I create from the starting point of a precise design and using, as primary language, all the ordinary techniques of woodworking.

Now these images and these items of furniture are born of the depths of my experience like a song, from the hope and the single alternative that lies before us, rather than nostalgia for the past”.

Giuseppe Rivadossi, Galleria del Naviglio, 1975