The
inspired innovation in zio Tonino’s techniques has been the employment
in the corky bas-relief (revolutionary even by itself!), a mosaic composed
by little pieces (strips or tesserae) cork bark, collected from the
highest and thinnest oak branches, therefore male cork. On that tree,
the artist used to find all the colours he needed to create his works,
obtaining directly from the cork a great range of colour shades, invisible
to most people. Using this pioneer technique deeply changed the artistic
cork manufacture.
If
we analyse his tool kit, we only find a little sharp blade, a rasp and
some sand paper; the placing of each tessera occurred with just the
help of a hammer and some glue. Then everything else was left to his
excellent manual ability and extraordinary imagination.
His testing wish led him to never-ending changes of style, in steady
and extreme search of details, relying upon the slightest variation
of colour nuances. The wealth of particulars is a characteristic of
all his composition and the obvious difficulty in realising these works
was as big as his inborn modesty, which led him to belittle the real
importance of his creations.
Different
remarks can be made about furniture: chests, beds, wardrobes, tables,
etc. They all have a wooden framework, since cork, although definitely
more lasting than wood, is more flexible than the latter, therefore
liable to deformation. For this reason, there’s the need of a
stiffer structure, over which the cork barks must be stuck.
The wooden base is often very simple (polylayered). Sometimes, as for
the precious wardrobes created in the sixties, the first-rate woodwork
had been carried out by skilled cabinet-makers, who followed his projects,
and were constantly supervised by the artist who took care of every
single detail. When the framework was finished, the covering could start,
with strips, tesserae and other corky adornments, as above described.
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