Interview with Cascione & Lusciov

How did you both meet, when did you form this artist partnership?

Our meeting was purely coincidental. We met many years ago in a bakery in Milan during a lunch break, at first the relationship was based on a deep love and mutual respect as designers and then flowed into an artistic partnership, but it took many years to develop a common language.

Whereabouts did you learn your trade; was it mostly self-taught, or did you attend an arts institution?

We are of the opinion that in life you can't improvise, everything requires a suitable scholastic education and a subsequent work formation. When this does not happen, the results are mediocre. We both attended the Academy of Arts and later design and goldsmiths institutes. Later, Roman worked in the field of furniture design and interior architecture with different well known design companies in Italy. For a decade Silvia worked as a fashion designer for famous Italian fashion houses and then moved on to creating her own bespoke jewellery brand, opening shop and atelier in the heart of Milan where she personally designs and sculpts every single creation by hand.

Supersonic Interceptor, 2017

Light and Radiant, 2016

Moving System, 2016

Time Dilation, 2016

Speed of Light, 2016

Which materials do you prefer working with and why?

Our favourite material is bronze because, apart from the intrinsic beauty of the material itself with its physical characteristics such as: durability over time, resistance, colour and gloss if well treated; it is a material that has an ancient history closely linked to human evolution.

How do you create your artworks, what processes and technology do you use?

We always start with a sketch followed by a draft clay model that is re-edited over and over until it convinces us. Once the volumetric details have been defined with the clay, we move on to the 3D modelling to get a better idea of how to sculpt it. Then we proceed with manual modelling the technical wax. Once a perfect max model is attained, we take it to the foundry to create a bronze cast that later gets manually chiselled, sanded and polished all by us.

Are there any materials and designs which you haven't explored but hope to venture into and test in the future?

In general we love metal, in all its forms. We would like to make a sculpture of monumental dimensions in the future, maybe combining it with new technologies.

Your artworks are incredibly sleek and often metallic, which gives the sense that there is a scientific precision to your work; equally however, there is a delicate, flowing and organic beauty to the sculptures you make. Could you comment on what inspires the shape and design of your artwork.

We are inspired by natural phenomena like stars and their atomic explosions, speed, time - all abstract concepts, more or less, so in fact ours is a work of mental synthesis that is transformed into shape. Although the topics we deal with are strictly linked to science, they are also linked to the human soul.

Yes, nothing is left to chance in our work, everything is planned and studied. The sculptures manage to be very precise because we use the techniques with which the works of complex jewellery are produced, that implies a strict precision, especially in manual modelling. The soul instead emerges from our minimal design that is somehow wild and aggressive; this is simply our style, the result of our artistic training, our history as designers and who we are as human beings.

Often in sculpture the most important factor is size, the bigger the better. Instead we focus on small poetic details that create a harmonious whole.

Defining our work as sleek flatters us, because elegance is beauty. Often in the artistic field we forget this aspect, for us however this quality is fundamental. We are two aesthetes, we love beauty in all its forms.

Which artists do you admire and why?

We admire the primordial idea of Brancusi, the reflective surfaces of Anish Kapoor, the world of Yayoi Kusama, the visionary Lucio Fontana and the list could continue…