Davide Grazioli is an artist with a nomadic approach moving through the most diverse media, ranging from painting to embroidery, from sculpture to video, sometimes even tresspassing the border with fashion design.

The focus of his quest might be perceived, broadly speaking in the journey itself. And right as the journey erodes a part of the traveller’s personality in order to let him/her absorb the other and the elsewhere, Grazioli’s ever changing work seems to incorporate many identities. Therefore the composite identity of this artist is not merely related to his geographical background in the traditional sense but it is more appropriately related to his diverse and distant experiences and to the choice of releasing his works each time in different places. This constant search for ambivalence and ubiquity allows the artist to pose questions about great transitions, whether they are cultural, spiritual, or environmental ones.

Grazioli seems to be raising questions about what is going to be destroyed and what is going to be spared in the hectic contemporary living, constantly defying the concept of border and identity.

The assimilative and inclusive artistic approach that Grazioli has developed thanks to his constant deplacements, led him to face trans-cultural themes in which the media he uses are a part – often unrepeatable - of the single series of works. This is the case of a work about  – and together with - the “hoarding painters” of Chennai (Tamil Nadu, India) in which the artist co-operated with a group of craftsmen destined to loose their jobs crashed by the arrival of new digital advertising printing techniques. This work aimed at detecting the threshold between past and future.

The clash between fragments of apparently incompatible realities, as urban versus forest life, emerges again in a work of 2005-2006 in which the artist portrayed the endangered species  by creating a series of burnable organic incense sculptures gathered in a riytual-like installation entitled “Sanctuary”.  Or again when working with a team of Muslim embroiderers he released a series of flags portraying tigers for an installation entitled “Prayer for the tiger” citing the Buddhist prayer flags. Highlighting once again the theme of impermanence and transiency a series of unravelled embroideries has been completed at the end of 2006 in Vietnam. Here delicate images of sacred trees, ascetics and animals carried the signs of a violent aggression.

The themes of environment and sustainability gain again the center of Grazioli´s work in 2007 when, after suffering a severe asthma attack caused by extreme pollution he presented in India the installation entitled “Before we go” in which dozens of human skulls made of organic incense, gold and myrrh lay on hundreds of lotus flowers. It is also related to the environmental issue the first video of this artist entitled “Waste” released in december 2007 as well as the series of unravelled embroideries of the year 2008 that display geographical maps, oceanic currents, Arctic and Antarctic Circle, plants and fishes which just got over an aggression threatening to destroy their image.

But the sense of loss is not the only result of this continuous observation of the changing world. It is at times present in Grazioli’s works a sense of fertility generated by the constant exchange between East and West, past and present, spirituality and materialism.

His passion for fabrics and his experience in experimenting with organic and recycled materials and colours led him to cooperate earlier in India with Prabha Nagarajan (Director of Organic Exchange India) and since 2008 in Africa as a fashion designer for the creation of Banuq an eco-sustainable and fair trade fashion label.

www.banuq.com

The very first Banuq collection was developed by Davide Grazioli in cooperation with Mauro Pavesi and Marina Spadafora and was presented at AltaRoma Carwalk (Rome) and at World Congress on Organic Cotton (Interlaken-Switzerland) an event made possible by the cooperation between Helvetas and ITC (International Trade Centre an operational organization of the UN).  - Read the biography