My heart jumped, I thrust open my eyes and a voice in my mind shouted “It is not possible!”. It wasn’t a tragedy, it was Love at first sight, a feeling similar to the one you can experience watching the best sunset of your life. L’orMa is a wizard able to pour the overwhelming power of a sunset into a dandelion. My idea that Art is not what you do, but how you do it actualizes in this very gesture.
Perhaps because I had always had a weakness for the shapes and colors of leaves and flowers, L’orMa’s works immediately took a piece of my soul, and from that moment I could have it back only looking at them again. He plays with fragility and turns it into lapidary stability – how? Just gaze at his dandelions confined in vegetal packages. Dandelion, such a fragile flower. I’m not even sure that it is a flower; to my eyes it could also be the tear of a goddess fallen among us poor mortals.
I’ve always dreamed of taking one of those dandelions that I usually see when I’m walking around home with me. I tried many times, I was careful to tear off the stalk from the root, so that the transparent hood couldn’t break, but by the time I arrived at home all the thin white filaments were gone, and I found myself staring at the desolate stalk wondering when it happened. I still try though, sometimes, waiting for the still air to come and help me to bring the dandelion safely, meanwhile I yearn for L’orMa’s dandelions, and for the leaves as well.
L’orMa (Lorenzo Mariani) is a young artist from Milan, where he currently lives and works. He studied at the Academy of Brera while working as assistant for the artistic group Vedovamazzei. Throughout his brilliant career he has experimented with many expressive techniques, such as painting, ceramic, collage and, since 2015, manipulation of vegetal fibers. These last are my favorite. Such a varied expressive vocabulary, such a unique refined virtuosity. How these visions occurred in his mind? Where did he get so much patience for building fibers cathedrals? The pyramids and the boxes made of leaves’ skeletons really are cathedrals for the dandelions, marble angels.
Follow L’orMa on Instagram and on www.lorma.eu