• Valentina Da Veiga

    Nicolò, looking at your work, there seems to be a recurring interest in what lies beneath the surface. Where do you think that fascination comes from?

  • Nicolò Krättli

    I think it goes back to my childhood. My mother worked as a conservator restoring artworks in old churches. Many of the medieval frescoes she worked on had been covered with white paint after the Reformation. Through the restoration process, these images slowly reappeared.
    I became fascinated by the idea that something could exist beneath what we see. Since then, I've always been interested in surfaces not as endings, but as thresholds. The superficiality of something is always what I question in architecture. Whenever I see something, I go and scratch it to see if it’s only surface and what’s below. I'm interested in what remains latent inside materials.

  • Valentina Da Veiga

    Both your stone works and your frescoes seem to begin with a kind of opening, cutting a stone, exposing a surface, allowing something hidden to emerge. What attracts you to that moment?

  • Nicolò Krättli

    For me, the surface is never just a skin. When I cut a stone, I'm not really interested in its exterior shape. What interests me is what happens inside. The cut becomes a tool for exploration. There's always a moment of surprise. Suddenly geological structures, colours, mineral veins, traces of immense periods of time become visible. It's similar with fresco. The pigments penetrate the lime and become part of the material itself. In both cases, something hidden becomes present.

  • Valentina Da Veiga

    Your works feel very physical, almost bodily. How important is the hand in your process?

  • Nicolò Krättli

    Very important. I think through my hands as much as through my mind. When you're working with stone, lime, plaster, and pigments, you're constantly receiving information through touch. There is a dialogue between touch and thought that I find very important. You begin with an idea, but the material pushes back, suggests another direction, and gives you answers.

  • Valentina Da Veiga

    Let's talk about the stone works. You collect stones from Val Bregaglia and then cut them open. What are you looking for when you choose a stone?

  • Nicolò Krättli

    Yes, I collected these stones with my son in the river. I'm not looking for beautiful stones in the traditional sense. I'm looking for complexity. Val Bregaglia has a very unusual geological history. Different rock formations, different temporalities, have been folded and displaced by tectonic movements over millions of years. You can find materials that shouldn't logically be next to one another, but geology has brought them together. When I collect stones, I'm attracted to those that might contain these hidden relationships. The cut allows me to investigate what is inside.

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    Riverstone

    Riverstone

    Riverstone

    $3,200.00
    $3,200.00

    The superficiality of something is always what I question in Architecture. Whenever I see something, I go and scratch it to see if it’s only surface and what’s below.

    • Valentina Da Veiga

      One of the most striking aspects of the stone series is that you keep the remains after cutting. Why was that important?

    • Nicolò Krättli

      Very early on, I felt that the leftover fragments couldn't simply be discarded. Once you cut the stone, you create a separation, but you also create a relationship. When the stone is opened, the two surfaces mirror each other.
      I became interested in reconstructing these fragments with plaster to understand what remained of the original stone after the blocks had been removed. The stone remains itself, but it has been transformed, and the cuts become scars. The resulting forms are hollow. They become vases. And somehow I feel they now carry much more than before.

    • Valentina Da Veiga

      They are carrying space now

    • Nicolò Krättli

      Yes, they carry void (laughs). I have to think about this now, I’m only at the starting point of it.

    • Valentina Da Veiga

      Talking now about your frescoes, the idea of scars also appears in them. How did you become interested in fresco as a medium?

    • Nicolò Krättli

       It started with the material itself. Through fresco, I also became aware of being connected to a much older tradition. When you work in fresco, you're entering into a dialogue with some of the earliest surviving images, from Ancient Rome to Ancient Egypt, whereas oil on canvas only emerged toward the end of the Middle Ages. I find that fascinating. And because you're painting directly onto a wall, fresco is also where painting and architecture meet.

      I work with non-hydraulic lime, which hardens by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air. Fresco has a very specific rhythm. You work in a giornata, meaning that each section has to be completed while the plaster is still fresh. You have to be quick, and this is what I liked. There is a beginning and an end to every working day; it almost becomes a performative act. What fascinated me most was a moment that fresco painters call the leather heart. At that stage, the lime is still soft beneath the surface, but the outer skin has stabilized. If you touch it, it no longer leaves residue on your fingers.
      That’s when the pigments are applied. They penetrate the first millimetres of the lime and become absorbed into the material.

    Al Fresco

    Al Fresco

    Al Fresco

    $2,300.00
    $2,300.00

    Nicolò Krättli

    Nicolò Krättli (*1987, Samedan, Switzerland) is a Swiss artist, architect, and curator... 

    Nicolò Krättli

    • Valentina Da Veiga

      So also technically, it feels like a skin.

    • Nicolò Krättli

      Yes, very early on, it felt very much like skin. I knew I had to follow the path of these “skins”. Then I started to colour the first layers with images of flesh, grease, and bones, what lies beneath the skin. Later, as I became more interested in the transparency of fresco, I began to think about the skin’s porosity, fragility, and translucency.

    • Valentina Da Veiga

      That’s where the veins, sunburns, tattoos, scars started to appear in your work?

    • Nicolò Krättli

      Yes, as I continued working, these associations became more explicit, and I found out so much about skin. For example, that all human skins are more or less the same orange tone, and then it changes only through pigmentation. It kept fascinating me, and day by day, I made always one big and one or two small pieces.

    • Valentina Da Veiga

      Even though the frescoes carry these images, they feel to me more real than representation, due to that skin quality, the texture and relief of the pieces.

    • Nicolò Krättli

      That's exactly what interests me. I don't think they're images of skin. I think they share certain qualities with skin. The sides are also an essential part of the work for me. They expose the thickness of the fresco and hint at what lies beneath the surface, creating the impression that one can somehow see behind the image rather than merely look at it. So the fresco acquires a translucency and material depth that changes with light and perspective. It's almost like a flat sculpture. Depending on where you stand, the work shifts.
      Because of this, the works seem to embody something. For me, the idea that the frescoes are “being” something is quite striking for my mind to conceive. It’s like they are a piece of “Speck” (laughs).

    • Valentina Da Veiga

      (laughs) During your research, you became interested in Ötzi, the Ice Man. (a naturally mummified body discovered in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps on the border between Italy and Austria, approximately 5,300 years old, exceptionally preserved). What attracted you to him?

    • Nicolò Krättli

      Ötzi is fascinating because he exists at the intersection of geology, time, and the human body. What particularly interested me were his tattoos. They're extremely simple marks, lines and small dark inscriptions distributed across the body.  They are thought to have had therapeutic or ritual functions, and many of them are located along points that correspond to meridians used in alternative medicine. I like to imagine them almost as a kind of medicine book written onto the body itself. I was struck by how close these markings felt to the questions I was already exploring, like the veins in stone or the pigments absorbed into fresco.

    • Valentina Da Veiga

      Yes, it fascinates me too. Somehow, he is a very old “human-fresco” (laughs). Could you talk about these two frescoes in front of us?

    • Nicolò Krättli

      Yes, here I tried to make a whale or dolphin skin. It was very flat after I laid down the pigment, and then I waited for the leather-heart moment to press a sponge into it, creating this undulation of the surface. Without it, you would also see more sand and not get this watery quality. On this other one, it’s a belly part I had in mind of the Ice  Man. It is very dark-skinned and very soft, unlike the rest of his body, which seemed much drier.

    Al Fresco

    Al Fresco

    Al Fresco

    $2,300.00
    $2,300.00

    Al Fresco

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    • Valentina Da Veiga

      I think it’s fascinating how these invite a slow kind of looking, a looking that is almost tactile.
      They make us aware of our own physical presence.

    • Nicolò Krättli

      Yes, it’s an echo of our organic nature.

    • Valentina Da Veiga

      And our vulnerability, which I feel a lot in this piece.

    • Nicolò Krättli

      Yes, it could be the skin after a bondage. I used a string to do that. Somehow this piece looks like it was exposed at the sun for a long time. I tried to show the violence that can appear on the skin. On the smaller one, I did it with the same process it felt more sensual. I started to question the erotic role of skin, and this is probably a theme I would like to keep working on.

    Al Fresco

    Al Fresco

    Al Fresco

    $2,300.00
    $2,300.00

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