Loris Cecchini. Sculptures for the Body

Text by Paola Stroppiana

Loris Cecchini (Milan, 1969) has pursued his personal artistic research since the 1990s using a range of techniques (sculpture, photography, installations, and drawing), developing a crystalline poetics with a highly recognizable stylistic signature: a constant reflection on the interaction between sculpture and architecture, between the artwork and space, between nature and perception.

This research has gradually led him—through increasingly complex structures and dimensions—to embrace environmental installations, creating site-specific sculptural works for both public and private commissions, indoors and outdoors.

Particularly fascinating, therefore, is a collection of precious ornaments, conceived more precisely as sculptures for the body, to which he applies—despite the different scale and context—the same poetic vision and the same concept of an expanding modular system, now challenged by the need to interact with a new dimension: the body as a moving organism, and with new materials.

Looking back over his long artistic journey, jewelry seems to have been somehow destined: it is significant that in The Hand, the Creatures, the Singing Garden, created for the Gori Collection at the Fattoria di Celle (Santomato di Pistoia), Loris, already in 2012, made a new “skin” for a tree—a bark made of hundreds of small chrome-plated steel modules that reflect the greenery and integrate with the rough surface of the trunk, respecting its essence: a shimmering tree sculpture, a tree ornament.

A few years later came Garden’s Jewels (Grenoble, 2016), a treehouse that appears to germinate from the very plant that hosts it, its title already hinting at the preciousness of this botanical bloom.

The leap from Nature to the human dimension—from organism to anatomy, and the consequent dizzying shift in scale and subject—occurred in 2020, when Loris responded to a private and sentimental commission (as often happens in the history of artist’s jewelry): to create a few wearable art jewels, one-of-a-kind micro-sculptures, for his wife Jade.

That idea has since evolved into highly distinctive forms, maintaining both material and conceptual continuity with his mirrored steel sculptures, while incorporating precious materials such as gold, silver, titanium, and ruthenium.

In the collection presented by BABS Art Gallery, this research materializes into a series of works produced in a maximum of 9 pieces each. His sculptures for the body retain the visionary and metamorphic spirit that characterizes his work, populated by plausible natural organisms and elements that are, in truth, unidentifiable with anything known.

This originality also extends to the typological choices of the ornaments: his earrings, asymmetrical and composed of combinatory modules—some of them mobile—envelop and trace the ear; the bracelet wraps around the back of the hand and transforms into a ring; the necklace harmoniously interacts with the neck, adapting to it while expanding outward in three-dimensional space.

These ornaments are an ideal continuation—through their structural element—of Waterbones, a series of works created starting in 2009, inspired by the morphology of plants and minerals.

In the rigid bracelet, available in several versions (silver, gold-plated, ruthenium-plated, and powder-coated brass), the surfaces are imprinted with light ripples that recall Wallwaves Vibrations, wall installations inspired by the movement of liquids and the propagation patterns of sound waves.

The way light reflects off the curves creates the illusion of embedded reflective stones.

The ring—crafted in silver, gold, and titanium—mirrors the same three-dimensional design and appears as the crystallized image of a fossil or an insect cocoon: precious objects for a future Wunderkammer.