23x17x5 cm

nr1/8

ZURINI Emmanuel

SWITZERLAND (1942)

Emmanuel Zurini, with an extraordinary intelligence for lines and forms, sculpts cars, airplanes, and offshore boats, capturing within the material the object of his passion: speed. Zurini undeniably possesses a taste for beauty. What he presents to the eye is the essential—the very spirit of an automobile—retaining only its elegance and power.

Born in 1942, Zurini was a schoolboy in the spirit of Prévert: brief studies, his head out the window, fascinated by racing. He became a Grand Prix photographer, publishing and exhibiting his work. In his thirties, he began, with apparent ease, a successful artistic career. When he took up the tools of a stone carver in his skilled hands, he pursued an obsessive and relentless quest for perfection in volume—boldly sketching simplified outlines, tightening the tension of horizontal lines, patiently refining contours, polishing and repolishing surfaces as if to give the material a transparency of soul. He meticulously supervised castings, burnished gold finishes, until achieving a mysterious form: the distilled expression of an automobile and a dazzling dream of speed. These fluid machines invite touch and convey, through their tactile presence, the tenderness of the creative gesture.

Zurini disdains ostentation, yet excels in the golden brilliance of bronze. At the same time, he works with noble materials—blocks of marble and granite—a technically demanding practice. Stone has meaning; it is cut with intention, always guided by the same principle. Through volume, the veins emerge from every angle, and it is the sculptor’s task to harmonize and balance the whole. At the height of his maturity, Zurini can undertake every expansion of his art—from monumental works, for which he has both the temperament and the breath, to jewelry, for his blacksmith’s hands possess the delicacy of a goldsmith.