Alessandro Marangon: a visual artist who transforms natural tree elements into works of art

Hi Alessandro, Could you introduce yourself? Who are you, how and when did you get in touch with art? How did yours come about and what is it inspired by?

Hello everyone. I am Alessandro Marangon and I am a visual artist. I started being creative as a child and pencils were my favorite playmates throughout childhood. Once I grew up, at the age of 15 I had an encounter with the world of writing and early 90s Italian hip hop. When I was 20, I came to Bologna, but it was not until I was 30 that I started creating again, first by modeling burnt plastics, then by working with papier-mâché and finally by collecting natural elements such as branches, thorns, barks, and then reconstructing them in careful and meticulous compositions.

Your works with thorns are really impressive, when did you start with this series? What was the inspiration?

My debut with thorns dates back to 2015, as I said before, my language had already been speaking with arboreal elements for a few years. I have always been fascinated by the Gleditsia Triacanthos, commonly called Spino di Giuda (Judas thorn), I am from Veneto and it is a tree that is not infrequently found in our parts, although its use in agriculture is disappearing, it was used to create fences and bushes to defend against animals. My father introduced me to it many years ago and I fell in love with it. I love the shapes of these spines, some even reach 20 cm, they are almost weapons, I have made a detailed study of their details and they lend themselves artistically to many applications. I have made some small sculptures that I have entitled "Dichotomies", where precisely the contrast between black and white, empty and full, plays the leading role. In the first quarantine, that of 2020, I had a largely open-air workshop in the hills of Bologna, and I also carved 1:10 scale wooden sculptures of these thorns, they were even more than 160 cm high!

A huge project that I will have to take up again sooner or later, and in my opinion, it has great potential.

Do you want to tell us about the works with barks instead? Do you personally look for them? where? and how do you make them like your works, what work is behind them?

The bark works come from a few years earlier and always from my love for the Venetian Lagoon and the Po Delta.

I recovered the first barks from drift poplar trees deposited by the sea on the beaches of the Porto Caleri Nature Reserve: after being washed away by the water and burnt by the action of the sun, their bark peels off like dry skin. And 'skin' is precisely the word that gives the series its name. The difficulty lies in recomposing it into a flat surface like a jigsaw puzzle, and therein lies an artist's skill and sensitivity in making everything homogeneous in a harmony of shapes and weights. I attempt to recreate the beauty of Nature's lines, I hope I succeed, there is no more arduous task.

In my latest works, I have also worked with oak, the Roverella of the Bolognese Apennines, but I would like to point out that no tree has been damaged, I always work with lifeless material.

I see that in addition to creating works with natural objects such as branches and barks, you also take photographs. What made you start taking photographs and when did you decide to expand your career to other artistic fields?

I don't call myself a professional but I love taking black-and-white images, I come from the world of graphics and this has led me to have a sensitive eye for framing. I feel very good when I photograph, without worrying much about the technicalities behind it, I put what I see in a frame and capture the moment, it is very liberating. That's why I use a film Lomography camera, a Holga 120, a device with a plastic lens that looks more like a toy than anything else, I like it because it doesn't have a zoom, you can't decide the exposure time, it has nothing, it just lets you press the shutter switch and that's it. The effect you create is to get photos that look like something out of the 19th century, I love it.

I have always been curious about every art form and I am very eclectic, I could go into any discipline, but I would still have a lot of fun.

Photographs then have always served me as an object of study for all my creations.

In October 2022, I was at the International Conference The Arts of Inclusion and Connection in Bologna where I was able to admire a series of your drawings as part of the presentation on the Mindscape concept (landscapes and memories in the discovery of the Self) by psychologist and art therapist Diletta Rusolo. Would you like to tell us about your drawings and your particular technique?

As I said earlier, my drawings also come from studying my photographs. I only returned to pencils last year, after a long break that lasted almost two decades, during the quarantine period when everything was impossible for us and I was locked in my workshop.

It was a hard struggle, I don't have a good relationship with drawing, as a complete autodidact I have to study the image a lot before portraying it, and photography and the use of the computer are of fundamental help to me.

It's all graphite on paper, and patience, enormous patience, some boards took me months.

Let's close with the classic question, but always challenging in my opinion, how and where do you see yourself in a year's time?

I see myself with new projects in the works: I am planning some workshops that if they take shape will keep me very busy, I have some new collaborations that I hope will take me out of the country. I am writing for the preservation of the memory of monumental trees, I would like to contact the municipal administrations or ordinary citizens who own these centuries-old trees when they die and offer them my artistic contribution to preserve their memory.

And I hope to still be locked inside my workshop, creating incessantly. Unfortunately, my job does not allow me the time I would like to dedicate to my art, I think I have not even begun to give shape to everything I have in mind, I am only at the beginning.

We at Il Mio Salotto absolutely wish you every success in realizing all your projects and thank you for dedicating part of your time and letting us into your world.

If you want to have a look at Alessandro's work, we leave you his website and social pages.

Web site: http://www.alessandromarangon.com/

Facebook: Alessandro Marangon Art

Instagram: alessandro_marangon_art