Edina Picco
Berlin, Germany
Website
www.edinapicco.com
Social Media
How would you describe your work?
I work with paper. My most recent works are a crossover of what is called crumpollage and cubomania. Though I don’t really find the reference to cubes fitting as I work with multiple shapes or simply polygons. I am still trying to find a better term for it, but at the moment I call my technique scrumplage as in shapes and crumpling.
It’s a sensual, very much hands on process where I scrunch paper, roll it, press it, tread on it. I cut it up, glue and straighten it, tear it up again until I get what I want. I really work the paper, giving it patina. I treat it with various acrylic mediums, add a dash or two of colour or use water and oils. It all depends on the effect I want to achieve. Thicker paper creases differently than thiner. I play with various thicknesses and textures, too. I experiment a lot.
This tactile approach is a translation of what I feel, see inside. My work is intuitive, impulsive and colour driven. Shapes are important but colour reigns. Colours affect us on an emotional level and that’s where my works come from. And that’s what I aim for: Connecting and communicating. Art is a language to me.
What inspires you?
The other day I saw this old man wearing a lemon yellow cowboy hat and bright red Western boots and I really got inspired. Or I see some street art when walking the dog…
Berlin is an amazing city. East and West meet, history lurks around each corner and there are a lot of influences from all over the World. There’s always something new and a lot to agree with it or to object. This is inspirational and I really need collage to express what I feel towards these things.
Can you speak about your process?
I used to lay out my collages before I would glue them, but I stopped doing that. Now I glue immediately and I trust more my intuition. For once because I made the experience that the glueing process can become very messy once you have several layers laid out on a canvas or cardboard and I usually mess something up when I start gluing.
The other reason is the surprise effect that sets in when I just go piece for piece without overthinking it. Then it’s like a puzzle evolving with every single piece. I start to see new things and go with the flow.
Of course there’s a risk to this approach: A bad composition, wrong colour choices… But I learned that mistakes are actually a good thing. They are a challenge, leading to unexpected and sometimes even much better results. I’ve come to like this loss of control, especially when I can step back and see that what was seemingly a mess has somehow transformed into a piece of art.
I usually sit down and start to work. This can be at any time of the day. I have a very busy time schedule with family, dog and a full-time job as a teacher at a public school. So I’m grabbing any moment that I can find in-between those obligations. But once I sit down, I dive into my work and nothing else matters anymore. That’s almost a spiritual experience to me.
How did you become interested in art?
I guess I have to thank my family for that. My dad Enea Picco (@piccoenea) is a fine art painter who studied briefly at the Academy of Art in Venice, but wasn’t seeing a possibility to make a living of it. In his early 40ties he returned to his art practice, literally over night.
Back then I was a teenager and I would watch him painting. I would listen to the group of artists that gathered around him and I learned a lot about composition and technique from them.
Though I briefly considered to study art, I opted for literature and economics, also because I had already experienced through my dad what it meant to enter the art business. At his time there hadn’t been any internet, where you could look up things, connect with other artists and show your work. It was just galleries and open calls you heard of from the galleries or maybe from a fellow artist. I believe that nowadays it is easier to show and sell your art even if it isn’t easier to make a living out of it.
Do you have any favorite artists, movies, books or quotes?
I recently came across a Kurt Schwitters’ quote that rang somehow true in my ears:
‘Art is not an elitist, transcendental undertaking, rather, it harbors a fundamental responsibility to dematerialize and reform the world in which it exists, patterning it anew.’
Schwitters was part of the DADA-Movement and of course he’s on my list of collage artists next to Rauschenberg or the postcard collages by Ellsworth Kelly. I really like Italo Valenti’s collages.
I’ve been only recently in Sofia where I was lucky enough to visit the Bulgarian National Gallery and discover Francisco Farreras’ collages. I also saw paintings by Roerich, Petrov, Rusev, Barcsay or Genkov and so many other eastern European artists and I was almost drunken by the end by the colour feast I experienced there. I deeply admire how brutally they mix vibrant and muted colours and how they achieve nevertheless this moving harmony.
Any more thoughts about art, creativity, or anything else you would like to share?
Like Schwitters I believe that art shouldn’t be treated as an elitist undertaking. Being creative is part of our human nature. We have an urge to be creative. My work at school reminds me of that everyday. Children are immensely creative and I love to witness how they use their creativity freely and without overthinking. They have questions, they want to know how things work and kids come up with thousands of ideas. I find it immensely inspiring to watch them in their creative process and I wish the scholastic system would value that more than it currently does - at least hereabouts.
