Federico Seppi, Icebreaker, Solo Show, Boccanera Gallery, Trento

Federico Seppi is an artist who works both in nature and with nature. Ever since his earliest works, he has studied the complexity of the elements in order to grasp their composition and dilate their forms, taking them almost to the limits of possibility and laying bare the fragility of nature itself. Pieces of wood are cut away to an almost impossible degree, transformed into slender shapes capable of supporting weights far larger than themselves, or into drops that withhold all the sediment of experience, transfigured in the description of territories.
Giovanna Nicoletti

Hertz, 2020, chalcography on paper, 45 x 45 cm
Minimi segni, 2020, lime wood and gouache silver leaf, 32 x 37 cm each
(4 elements)
Minimi segni, 2020, lime wood and gouache silver leaf, 32 x 37 cm, detail
Movimento glaciale, 2020, lime wood and gouache silver leaf, 153 x 32 x 25 cm
Fiume di ghiaccio, 2021, spruce wood from Val di Fiemme, 372 x 88 x 80 cm cm
Superfici sospese, 2021, spruce wood from Val di Fiemme, silver leaf and black tempered glass, 315 x 250 cm
Glacier keeps an eyes on you, 2020, poplar wood, ink and silver leaf, 48,5 x 59,5 cm
Ghiacciaio Due Forni, 2020, poplar wood, ink and silver leaf, 125,6 x 180 cm
Marmolada per frammenti, 2020, poplar wood, ink and silver leaf, 200 x 200 cm
Ghiacciaio Adamello, 2021, poplar wood, ink and silver leaf, 250 x 450 cm
Astrazione Wall 1, 2021, poplar wood, ink and silver leaf, 84 x 46 cm
Astrazione Wall 2, 2021, poplar wood, ink and silver leaf, 84 x 46 cm
Astrazione Wall 3, 2021, poplar wood, ink and silver leaf, 84 x 46 cm
Astrazione Wall 4, 2021, poplar wood, ink and silver leaf, 84 x 46 cm

Photos credit: Daniele Fiorentino

Federico Seppi was born in Trento in 1990.
In 2014 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in the painting course. He graduated with honours in Sculpture with Mario Airò by discussing a thesis entitled ‘Materia viva’ (living matter), deepening the poetics of materials in the representation of the binomial Art and Ecology.
Between 2015 and 2016 he attended the Sculpture and Installation course in Cardiff, at the Metropolitan University.
In 2015 he participated in the group exhibition Nature, Art and Ecology at the MART Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Galleria Civica.
In 2019 he participated in the collective exhibition Materia Prima at Palazzo Aliprandini in Livo (Val di Non). The same year, the ‘E(U)nglish Lawn’ project was selected for the London is Open residency and presented at the Estorick Collection of Modern Art in London.

For Federico Seppi, choosing the natural environment as a horizon is not a way to express the communicative potential of an artistic work carried out on the path of imitation or camouflage, as often becomes clear from the work of his cohorts, but is almost always an alchemical process of distillation, of the extraction of those aesthetic and physical atoms that nature itself offers us, and which in his works become the cornerstones of his research. Chiara Casarin