The Switching and Scraping Techniques
by Iacopo Maria Fiorani

This article was originally published on Hue & Eye.

About Iacopo Maria Fiorani

Iacopo Maria Fiorani (b.1975) is an Italian artist currently living in Rome. He loves the sea, has a passion for fishing and lived a few years in Greece (Athens, 2003-2005), a country which he considers to be one of the places he might one day call home.

Iacopo comes from a family of psychologists and doctors, but he always had a fascination with art, drawing monsters and caricature figures all through his childhood. He chose to pursue a degree in Sociology with a thesis on Cultural Anthropology (2001), to further develop his rebellious inclination for humanistic studies. The combination of these life experiences led him to explore a more artistic path by enrolling into the school of the Tuscan sculptor and painter Leonetto Tintori. There Iacopo begun experimenting with several art techniques and, with time, built a personal artistic path he nowadays considers to depict a primary core of his being.

Iacopo manages to combine his intricate emotional knots with his search of order and balance. To achieve this, he had to come up with a unique technique, a tool to communicate his real roots, primordial emotions, and intimate messages. Iacopo accomplished this when he discovered the Scraping, and then the Switching techniques. These two methods, fundamental to the making of his fascinating art pieces, made him distinguished and recognized in the field of Modern Art.

Iacopo’s Techniques

Iacopo Fiorani’s starting point is not a vivid vision of what the final artwork will be, but a somewhat chaotic feeling made of vague emotions. Iacopo attempts to use the canvas as an experimental platform. The canvas and the artist are central in his work, as a reaction to the lack of mindfulness in our hyper-technological society. To express all these ideas, thoughts and feelings, he practices the Scraping and the Switching methods. The Scraping is a process of adding and removing layers of paper and colors, the exact inverse way as the Switching process works. Switching method is the one Iacopo most identifies with, calling it: “The reconciliation of instinct with form”. This technique consists of the intricate process of glueing together paper pieces previously soaked in paint and then fixing them onto a fresh canvas. The common thread in both techniques Iacopo utilizes is the complexity of the intimate feelings the artist deals with and creates a sort of ritual he undertakes while creating the piece. It’s always about adding, removing, glueing or fixing pieces of his emotional layers, a metaphor that Iacopo applies to life itself.

Iacopo Maria Fiorani never considered himself to be a proficient painter until the art critic David Miliozzi defined him as one of the leading representatives of the brand new art movement called Hyperexpressionism, a fresh contemporary art concept founded in Italy in 2016. Iacopo was initially resistant to exhibit his work in art galleries. He had an aversion to the artistic competition of the contemporary society, seeing it as a race for the most original art piece. Iacopo instead chose to focus on the humanity in all of us by communicating his internal torment through the canvas. Despite that, since 2016, he has been thoughtfully exhibiting his works in various events in Europe (Berlin, Rome, Prague) together with artists such as Hsiao Chin, Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli, Mimmo Rotella.

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