ANDREA
CERQUIGLINI

Born in Rome in 1961, Andrea Cerquiglini, architect, moved to Milan in 1989 where he works as project designer of showrooms, work environments, trade fair stands, light installations. Genetically attracted by the Far East, from 2008 up to 2014 he lived and worked in Seoul for long periods. Eclectic in temper, he has spent a lifetime cultivating artistic expression in parallel to his profession and with methodical discontinuity. An “indispensable need” as he usually states.

Why pens and notebooks?

I found that using linen notebooks and black gel pens was a suitable way to express myself during my many travels. At the beginning it was many colors, then less and less.

I open the notebook then focus exclusively on the centerfold. Once finished, I like to suspend it in mid-air inside a plastic box/frame, transparent but not invisible.

Do you draw or write?

If something doesn’t feel right to me, I tend to dwell on it, in a circular, repetitive way. Troubles, yes, I put them down in writing. Weird? Maybe, but nothing describes my thought better “seen from close up nobody is normal”, as Caetano Veloso sang in his “Vaca profana”. Troubles, anxiety, unresolved questions, but also everything that comes to my mind, I write it down, like a litany, a mantra, a sort of dripping of words that I let go to melt on the notebook pages. Having said that, text only interests me for its graphic and aesthetic strength, to me text is not to be read. To be honest, when I see someone trying to read it, almost searching between the lines, I get quite embarrassed about it.