Orfeo Tagiuri on etching love’s delicate dance

In his latest exhibition, ‘Points of Contact’, Orfeo Tagiuri transforms the tender beginnings of a budding romance into a sacred experience. With every brushed hand, shared cigarette, and wiped tear, he captures the essence of these early moments. Through deeply personal etchings on stained birch wood, Tagiuri blends emotions with memories, creating a montage of love’s delicate dance. Painful symbols like piercing nails and dripping blood reveal raw, internal wounds, while blooming flowers and angelic wings hold a sense of awakening and rebirth.

Plaster speaks with the artist about nostalgia, gratitude and his landmarks of love.

Apparently this exhibition begins with a story involving a cigarette.

The first time I tried a cigarette I was 12 years old and afterwards I felt like I’d swallowed hot cement. For the next week, I was so guilty that after several sleepless nights, I eventually confessed to my parents. At that time the idea of stepping into an unknown, ‘shadowy’ and adult world terrified me.

Many years later, some of my earliest interactions with my partner were over shared cigarettes. Here there is also a new world opening but inversely it is one of playfulness, tenderness, and well-informed innocence. Art has always dissolved such binaries for me and I like that in this case the cigarette represents that duality.

The first piece you see in the exhibition is this hand offering a cigarette and inviting you in.

Your new works are wood stain painted onto wood panels. Why are you drawn to this medium?

In the most practical sense, each panel begins as a very light wood. This is stained darker and subsequently carved into to re-expose the lighter wood beneath. I repeat this process several times to create a broad range of woody tones.

It is a process that any student who has ever scratched into their desk at school has done before me. The only difference would be if that student was allowed entire months for their daydream scrawling. It is the same with lovers carving their initials on trees. Except instead of a hasty love-heart I have the time to carve myself wrapped in a sleepy embrace.

When I was in high school we used to line up outside the main hall for our exams. Over the years students had scratched their names into the stone walls while they waited and there was a rich patina of marks. I scratched my own initials into the wall with the sharp corner of a 50p coin. Afterwards, before each exam, I would pause to touch my letters for good luck.

I love seeing man-made erosion. The worn-grass paths in a park, the faded fabric of tube seats, the polished feet of statues where pilgrims have knelt to touch. In a way, this process is a sort of erosion where my inner world meets the wood and leaves its mark.

You’re known for using brown, rusty colours in your work. They seem to hint at a kind of pre-modern, candlelit age. What draws you to this palette?

I like the idea of a ‘candlelit age.’ My grandparents used to light our family dinners with oil lamps and there is such a wholesome warmth to that. I suppose, in contrast to the sharp, polished steel or neon colours of a lot of art today, there is a kind of nostalgic looking back in these woody tones. In the context of a (perhaps appropriately) declining interest in religious institutions, I am curious about the aesthetics of those spaces and what value can be carried forth out of the creative decisions and approaches that were able to so potently present certain narratives over thousands of years.

Gratitude seems to be a key theme in recent paintings. 

The works have a lot to do with gratitude for my partner and how a safe and loving relationship has allowed for an openness, tenderness and creativity that had previously been entangled. These figures embracing suggest romantic love but also about the connection one has with oneself and the parts that we acknowledge and reject.

These works are love songs – but I think a lot of love songs can also be interpreted as conversations with a creative muse. The lyrics to Bob Dylan’s Shelter From The Storm for instance: “I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form. “‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm.’” These make me think of the sense of meaning, order, purpose and poetry that can come from a creative practice.

I am deeply grateful for the many artists and poets who have come before us and have shown pathways for navigating life both internally and externally.

Humour and elated emotion in your work are reminiscent of comics and children’s animations. What artists and other cultural touchpoints inspire you? 

As much as these works occupy a kind of painterly sphere, I would like to say I am primarily inspired by artists who paved the way in conceptual artmaking. Artists like Allan Kaprow, David Hammons and Jenny Holzer integrated their practices into daily life and in doing so celebrated the components of that life. The paintings in this show take small moments of everyday life, a hug/embrace/smoke and monumentalise them.

Someone asked me the other day why so many of my characters have their eyes closed. When I was young my father worked in Japan and each time he travelled he would bring me back a small statuette of the Buddha. I think somehow that serene facial expression has found its way into my work.

You made these works during a residency at Worlingham Hall, Suffolk. How did you find working somewhere other than your studio?

Yes! I had the great pleasure of spending a month at Worlingham Hall in Suffolk at the invitation of Italo Marzotto the founder and director of IM Residencies. To be honest, in the first few days, I felt a real emotional whiplash as I moved from the distracted pace of London to the calm confrontation of the forests at Worlingham.

But it was actually just what I needed and I gradually found my own rhythm. With no sense of pressure from other people, I would spend a morning doing almost nothing and with the space that filled me I would enter the studio and work until night had fallen. It was an immensely productive time both in terms of work output and inspiration.

This series is deeply personal and romantic. Did you connect with any specific songs or albums while working on it?

I can’t work to music with lyrics. I think this is because it pulls me back into my mind/logic rather than into the physicality/tactility I would like to find through making. I listened to Brad Oberhofer’s soundtrack for the Netflix Andy Warhol series a lot while working. In the evenings Bill Callahan’s album Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest and a series of playlists commissioned by Studio Blanco (Italian advertising agency) by a bunch of amazing artists (Mike Kelley, Camille Henrot, Cyprien Gaillard etc all on Spotify!)

Do you have a favourite piece in the show? 

There is a piece called Nightly Choreography, that feels just right to me. It is a couple embracing in sleep. I’m avoiding the word ‘spooning’ because it makes me slightly nauseous haha. Simply put I feel like that work holds the kind of real joy of being able to curl up next to someone you love at the end of the day. It is a monument to that feeling and is a landmark I can return to in search of that.

How did the collaboration with General Assembly gallery come about? 

I have really enjoyed curator Robbie von Kampen’s curation over the past year and the tangible sense of community that he has built there. The space itself is a miracle discovery in the middle of Mayfair and there is definitely a shared language between the classical interior and my woodworks. It has been a real treat working with him and his collaborator Melanie Ashton.

Do you have any ambitions in your practice that are not-yet-realised? Any dream shows, projects or other artists to collaborate with?

Of course, the list is infinite! My studio is full of little seeds for new directions and every so often one of them is ready to bring forward. In many ways, art today is a one-way street where beauty is reserved for galleries and museums. One of my overarching aims is to make art that travels in the other direction and imbues our everyday lives with poetry.

I would love to present a series of large canvas works in a basketball court – maybe the court Alvaro Barrington did with Serpentine a while ago! I would also like to do a parade with a series of text-based pieces I have made. People would march with banners I had made, like a protest but instead of anger or sadness, the resistance would be poetry!

What’s coming next? Any more plans for the year?

I am really excited to be doing another residency this summer with Caspar Williams (CG Willams Gallery) split between Venice and Tuscany that will culminate in a solo show in Sienna.

There are a couple of printed-matter projects coming along and some small group shows. Aside from that I am ecstatic to be returning to a newly emptied studio for whatever will emerge!