Milanese emerging artist, Davide Dicorato ventures into an archival narrative.
Born and raised in Milan, the emerging artist Davide Dicorato’s playful approach renders humor into his practice, achieving highly sensory results with simple, spontaneous gestures. Working in a wide variety of mediums and languages, the Milan-based artist’s work usually employs stark visual juxtapositions between found materials and ready-mades, often decontextualizing organic shapes and forms and combining them with synthetic and mass-produced objects. Thus, he stimulates the creation of new narratives which harbor an ongoing conflict between nature and artifice, upturning accepted logics and assumed categories of representation. Constantly dismantling and assembling, Davide reworked the contemporary ruins to assume a regenerative value and identity.
Throughout your career, you have explored the ongoing conflict between nature and artifice. When did you begin to cultivate an interest in this as a practice?
The interest in the relationship, rather than conflict, human nature is something that I have cultivated over time. For example, as a child, my favorite subjects were geography, history, archaeology. I think these passions have brought them into how I have become, integrating them with my research as an artist and practice, facing them in the most anthropological aspects.
Your work employs stark visual juxtaposition between found materials and ready-mades, would tell us a bit where you find the materials that are used in your work? And do you have a particular selection or preference in choosing them?
The objects I work with come from different realities, and I don’t have a precise rule that I follow. Certainly, when I take a trip or visit a new place, I tend always to try to bring me memories of objects, as if they were elements of a scheme or a trace of memory of my experience. Another place where I stock up on objects is a Moroccan boy from the stall of Mimmo who empties the cellars. When I choose or find objects or natural elements, I let myself be guided very much by instinct, mainly I try to surround myself with objects with an evident temporal experience, but also completely new objects.
Presumably, there is a lot of room for chance given that a lot of your process first relies on finding materials through random encounters. How do you come up with the compositions in your work in such a hybrid status?
Work always takes place through continuous trials of combinations and juxtapositions of balances and displacements in space, potentially a constant process that could never end.
Being a born-and-raised Milanese, what did it mean to be an emerging artist in Milan?
Being an emerging artist in Milan, in my opinion, is not different from being in another Italian city. The Milanese scene is quite buzzing, but at the same time, inclusive. We all know each other, at least by sight. I think that a city like the Lombard capital can give more opportunities than other places. Even if for me, it has become limited because it is accommodating. It inhibits my desire to change cities, even going abroad. But in the end, I feel fine living in Milan.
What are you working on presently?
I am currently working on three “sound” cushions, and I have in mind a couple of people with whom I would like to collaborate on the audio track. The idea of this work stems from three photographs I took of Margherita di Savoia’s salt pans, depicting cracks in an arid land. The work is a work-in-progress. I would like to present this work with a personal exhibition.
It is commonly thought that artists often have unrealized projects that they want to create if the occasion presented itself. Is there one in particular that you desire to bring to life?
Usually, I always try to think and produce jobs with the means and finances that I have available, perhaps because it also seems right to me to relate to work in this way. So I don’t have “huge” projects in the drawer, ready to pull out whenever someone would like to pay to do it. If there is an opportunity in the future, I will be ready.
