The Works of Luigi Turati
"I want to be criticised and appreciated for what I am worth, not because I am blind. It weighs on me because it is deviant: I want only my work to be judged. But, unfortunately, there is still a concept in our culture that it is the outward appearance that prevails'.
This is somewhat the manifesto of Luigi Turati, summarising a decisive approach for which it is the sculptures that must tell us about him and his way of feeling.
Luigi, born in 1955, is Milanese by birth and has his sculpture workshop in Milan. He is slender, his hands are tapered and elegant and he is blind.
He exhibited for the first time about 30 years ago at the Mioccio Gallery and has since then held numerous solo and group exhibitions. The latest exhibition was held in February 2015 at the Istituto dei Ciechi in Milan and was inaugurated on the occasion of a visit by Cardinal Angelo Scola.
Luigi Turati works with bronze, marble, forex, but his favourite material is wood because "With wood, you can't have a well-defined design: you have to adapt to its lines and sharpen the sensitivity of your fingers to follow its shapes"..
He only uses old-fashioned tools: gouges, chisels, mallets, files and absolutely nothing electrical.
'Sculpting' means giving form to matter and doing so without being able to see involves facing a path that others, the 'normal', can only partially imagine. Touch and finger sensitivity then become the way to discover new worlds and invent one's own language to communicate it. In fact, Luigi states "Sculptural art is a tactile art. I always advise the viewer to touch the works to really understand them. Unfortunately in most museums and exhibitions this is not possible because touching is forbidden."
Of course, in the case of great masterpieces, touching them in the long run would risk ruining the works, but as you can read in one of our articles there are now talking' models that can also help blind people build their mental image of great masterpieces.
Dr. Carmelo Chines
Direttore responsabile
English 
Italian