“El tipo puede cambiar de todo. De cara, de casa, de familia, de novia, de religión, de Dios.
Pero hay una cosa que no puede cambiar, Benjamín. No puede cambiar de pasión.”
(Pablo Sandoval, alias Guillermo Francella, in El Secreto de sus Ojos, direction by Juan Josè Campanella, 2009)
Born in Rome in 1961, Andrea Cerquiglini is a fully qualified architect. He moved to Milan in 1989 where he works as project designer of showrooms, work environments, trade fair stands, light installations. Genetically attracted by the Far East, from 2008 up to 2014 he lived and worked in Seoul for long periods. Eclectic in temper, he has spent a lifetime cultivating artistic expression in parallel to his profession and with methodical discontinuity. An “indispensable need” as he usually states.
Why pens and notebooks?
I found that using linen notebooks and black gel pens was a suitable way to express myself during my many travels. At the beginning it was many colors, then less and less. I open the notebook then focus exclusively on the centerfold. The result, I called it “quadroquaderno”, I like to suspend it in mid-air inside a plastic box/frame, transparent but not invisible.
Do you draw or write?
If something doesn’t feel right to me, I tend to dwell on it, in a circular, repetitive way. Troubles, yes, I put them down in writing. Weird? Maybe, but nothing describes my thought better “seen from close up nobody is normal”, as Caetano Veloso sang in his “Vaca profana”. Troubles, anxiety, unresolved questions, but also everything that comes to my mind, I write it down, like a litany, a mantra, a sort of dripping of words that I let go to melt on the notebook pages. Having said that, text only interests me for its graphic and aesthetic strength, to me text is not to be read. To be honest, when I see someone trying to read it, almost searching between the lines, I get quite embarrassed about it.
What about Secret gardens, Hermitages, Guardians?
Architecture could not stay out of my thoughts, and actually it has made a strong entry into quadriquaderni, it took shape in my mind during a walk in the surroundings of Trevi, in Umbria, my mother Diana’s village, and partly also of my silent father Mario. In the countryside farmhouses here are carved stone blocks among olive trees.
May be there is in my DNA something of a remote amanuensis monk, and not only for the handwriting, but for the world that I represent.