About the artwork

Water droplets creating overlapping ripples, sound vibrations propagating through space, summer heat waves, energies dissipating: waves are an all-encompassing and ever-present motif in nature. The Italian artist Loris Cecchini has managed to carve this elemental symbol into the surface of this extraordinary print. We see a visual pattern of vibration, a fluid relief that transforms the piece into a three-dimensional masterpiece. ‘Paper Waves’ constitutes a visual intervention: the static rigidity of the two-dimensional paper surface morphs into something organic, malleable and sculptural. You are compelled to touch it, to check for a heartbeat of the broiling energy beneath, perhaps expecting it to be fluid and malleable. 

Cecchini’s work on paper is created in preparation for his larger wall reliefs. His ‘modus operandi’ is the scientific study and recording of physical phenomena such as waves, which are remodelled to mould the surface of Japanese paper. In a sense, the artist attempts to freeze motion in time, creating an homage to nature that implies a sense of tenderness and care: “I look at the relationship between aesthetics and science: I stay on the boundary between the natural and the artificial, I draw from nature which I then work with using other forms of knowledge and, in the end, I try to create a shift, a poetic suspension,” says Cecchini.