Celebrating the centenary of Industrie Toscanini with the art of Tommaso Verdesca

In our centenary year, we wanted to complete our activities aimed at sharing our history with friends, contributors, customers and suppliers by asking a number of artists to explore the coat hanger and its forms. Each of the artists we contacted responded in their own unique way, using the tools of expression that work best for them to offer their own fascinating personal interpretation of the object. The occasion was the Arte Festival 2020 exhibition which took place in Varallo Sesia in September, an event which promotes the artistic and cultural activities of the Valsesia area.

An artistic combination: Toscanini at the Arte Festival 2020

The works created for us by Tommaso Verdesca, Daniele Verdesca, Fabio Nicola/Homo Faber, Christian Costa and Silvano Rotti delighted the visitors to the space outside Palazzo d’Adda and projected the coat hanger as an object into an artistic dimension with which it’s perfectly at ease. This isn’t the first time that one of our products has become a “work of art”. One previous occasion was the installation by the Albanian artist Anila Rubiku at the Venice Biennale exhibition of 2012.

First, the introductions: Tommaso Verdesca

We’d like to introduce you to five great artists who accepted our invitation to tell you about the poetry of our works. We’ll start with Tommaso Verdesca.

Tuscan by birth, he spent his childhood in the beautiful town of Cortona, where Tommaso lived and breathed art from his very earliest years. He watched his father Daniele while he worked with wood and stone or while he painted in his studio. Here, he absorbed every movement and expression, before going on to spend his own formative years first at the Artistic High School, then gaining a diploma in Design followed by a degree in Architecture at Milan Polytechnic in 2009. Today, he works as an interior designer, but art and its various expressions have always been his main areas of interest. In 2019, he founded the BorderLine Studio, then, in the following year, with the support of a group of art lovers, he set up the Borderline Cultural Association, which promotes initiatives in contemporary art.

Tommaso Verdesca interprets the Toscanini coat hanger

Tommaso Verdesca created “Cuts” especially for us. This is a work in which the cuts made in the wood move the material to create lights and shadows and new, unexpected volumes which become alive with colour. A narrative path that moves by subtractions and gives the object a dynamism which takes on a new sculptural meaning. In “Cuts”, we can clearly see the architectural approach to the material, which is used as an element to be moulded to create fluid volumes in which light and air are able to interact.