Interview with Luisa Pineri
She lives and works in Milan, where she studied Applied Arts and Architecture, graduating from the Polytechnic of Milan. She worked in garden art, participating in international competitions, and since 2010 has focused on painting and photography. She transforms everyday and discarded materials, such as corrugated cardboard, into monochrome works where memory, artistic gesture, and sustainability intersect. Her creations explore abstraction, the metamorphosis of matter, and the poetry of the everyday, generating vibrant forms and atmospheres.
Your work Codice Residuo was selected among the 13 finalists of the 2025 edition of the COMEL Award. How did you receive this recognition? Were you already familiar with the Award?
I welcomed this recognition with gratitude and a genuine emotion. The COMEL Award has long been a point of reference for those who work with aluminum in a contemporary and experimental way, and I was well aware of the quality and rigor of the projects selected in previous editions.
I had never participated before, because aluminum is not a material I usually work with. Precisely for this reason, being among the finalists has a special meaning for me: it feels like a recognition of a coherent formal and conceptual research, beyond the specific material. It is an important encouragement to continue and deepen this direction of work.
The title of the work refers to a “code,” perhaps a message to be deciphered, and to a “residue” that is both material and conceptual. Can you tell us where the intuition for this title comes from and what message the work conveys?
Codice Residuo stems from the idea that every material carries within itself a trace, a memory, almost a silent language.
The “code” is what remains to be deciphered: marks, stratifications, scars of the matter that refer to previous times and uses.
The “residue” is both physical — the recovered object, marked by wear — and conceptual: what survives processes of consumption, transformation, and oblivion.
The work does not propose a single, univocal message, but invites a slow, contemplative act of reading, in which one can recognize value and dignity in what is normally excluded, discarded, or forgotten.
From a formal point of view, what technique did you use to create the work, and what challenges or choices did this process involve?
The work originates from the recovery of the radiator of an air conditioner, dismantled and isolated like an organ, a mechanical lung. Its creation took place through a manual intervention that transformed a purely functional object into a poetic surface.
The process required a constant balance between control and listening to the material, where the drawing is not imposed but emerges from a careful reading of the texture, the folds, and the fragilities of the material itself.
The main challenge was respecting this unusual material, working on the extremely delicate aluminum fins without erasing their original identity, but rather accompanying their transformation.
In Codice Residuo there is not only aluminum but also copper. What does the coexistence of these elements express in your work? What characteristics do you recognize in each of them? Had you already worked with aluminum before? What artistic qualities do you associate with it?
The presence of aluminum and copper might suggest a dialogue between two very different materials. In reality, copper has an exclusively structural role, entirely at the service of aluminum.
It is a hidden skeleton that holds the various fins together, an invisible structure that supports without imposing itself visually. This silent relationship reinforces the idea of an internal balance, where what sustains the work deliberately remains in the background.
This year’s theme was “strength”: in what way do you feel you responded to this theme through your work? How did the conceptual aspects of your research express themselves through the technical and material ones?
In Codice Residuo, strength is not understood as power or dominance, but as resilience.
It is the silent strength of matter that, through the creative act, transforms into something else and continues to resist despite wear and the passing of time.
Aluminum, thanks to its ductility, embodies this resilient and transformative capacity particularly well: an apparently fragile material that reveals, through change, its own tenacity.
In your creative research, there is a clear attention to reclaimed objects and the desire to give new life to materials. Can you tell us where this research originates and how it has developed over the years?
This research stems from a sensitivity that has grown over time, also thanks to my training as an architect, which leads me to look at objects and materials beyond their specific function.
I am interested in creating new meanings in the relationship between form and function, shifting the focus from use to presence.
I have always considered objects as carriers of memory, and in recent years I have increasingly worked with what has already been used, discarded, or considered marginal, in order to give it a new possibility of meaning through a gesture that unites ecological, ethical, and poetic attention.
Which masters of the past have most influenced your artistic path? In which works do you unexpectedly recognize traces of teachings that have been absorbed and now re-emerge?
My references have never been imitative, but rather interiorized over time.
Artists such as Burri, Kiefer, Morandi, as well as a certain essential architecture — I think of Mies van der Rohe or Tadao Ando — have influenced my way of thinking about space, matter, and silence.
Sometimes I recognize these traces resurfacing unexpectedly, especially in my most essential works, where subtraction becomes language and emptiness takes on an active role.
Can you tell us something about your future projects?
I am carrying forward two lines of research. The first focuses on the dialogue between matter and the memory of objects, with particular attention to discarded and residual materials.
The second, more pictorial, explores the depth of abysses, understood as a metaphor for an inner, intimate, and stratified search.
My interest in site-specific works and in projects that combine art, architecture, and landscape also remains central, always maintaining a contemplative and introspective dimension.
Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!
