Reborn with Art and Spirituality in the Works of the Italian Artist Filippo Biagioli
When promoting the deep meaning of Tribal Arts and Ritual Arts
Tell us what you do and your beginnings.
I started painting after a car accident when I was doing my military service. It was 1997. Initially, my works were figurative. I took my first artistic steps in the city of Pistoia, where the community of artists was very developed but very limited in their vision of art. They were old and I was young, I thought they had the experience to teach me how to proceed in my artistic career. Instead, no, on the contrary, many of them had negative and almost arrogant comments about my work. Only one of them, Romolo Romano, always believed in me and pushed me to be myself. I owe everything to him.
So my painting became instinctive, aggressive, ironic, and angry at the same time. I started studying the various currents, and the various artists. I looked for wood in the companies near my home and my former employer, who believed in me, gave me broken sheets. I made large canvases with these waste materials and painted everything I saw around me. I continued like this until 2007. The accident I had had created serious psychological problems, so much so that I had become anorexic, I refused food and weighed 42 kg. I spent many years in therapy. However, it helped me a lot to free all the "me" that remained buried. So, in 2007 I began to express everything I loved and, out of fear, had remained closed inside me.
I began to give free rein to all the Spirituality that I had, I created votive statues and “Guardian Figures”. It was in this period that my artistic vein divided. Always following the same creative language, I began to create paintings that were and are a sort of diary of everything I see around me in the surrounding and tangible world. On the other hand, I began to create Tribal and Ritual Art, this was and is; the realization of what I see and feel in the invisible, intangible world in which I live perpetually. Difficult to explain, I live as if I were walking on the line that separates the tangible world of everyday life from the invisible world of the afterlife. I am not ashamed to say it and seem like a madman who escaped from who knows where.
I owe a lot to both worlds. I have had several important miracles since 1997, and so during the last one, in 2014, I promised that I would work for free to be able to advance the Word of God and the dialogue between religions. Today in 2025, I paint, I sculpt, I work with fabric, I forge Swords, I do everything; everything I feel I have to do according to the will of God. I must admit, that it has led me to important results.
What does your work aim to say?
I try to promote the message of dialogue, brotherhood, and cessation of gratuitous hatred, disrespect, and beauty. In addition, I encourage the deep meaning of Tribal Arts and Ritual Arts. A manuscript of mine on this subject “The Child with Dust Blanket”, is in the collection of the Guggenheim Library in Venice. Peggy Guggenheim also collected Tribal Art and immediately understood its importance.
The manuscript tells the story of a child, who having to leave home for the first time and face the world had difficulty interacting with it because he was completely covered by a blanket of dust, his eyes were unusable. But in the end, he managed to walk confidently, because developing the other senses, he began to “see and hear” not only with his eyes and ears.
This is the beauty of Tribal Arts, the work is not “cold” like a work of contemporary art, it is instead vibrant, full of warmth of Spirituality. Characteristics that I also look for in creating my work. And it is an immense joy for me when collectors tell me that my works convey something.
Where do you find inspiration in your art?
I am in love with Creation, nature, and animals, much less with men technically. I love Death Music, Metalcore, Black Metal, and many of its derivatives. I love reading old books, I love Art, and I love visiting churches and cemeteries, all this leads me to always be subject to many stimuli that I then report in my Ritual Works.
For the canvases instead... just look around... On social media stupidity runs at a frenetic pace traveling from post to post, on TV it often passes into the concept that if there is no discussion between several people who shout and offend each other, the hoped-for audience will not be reached. Books are now written in series just to attract the public, not to mention films or information. Material that inspires me with irony to reproduce in paintings, there is so much of it.
Could you give us some insight into your creative process?
The work of an artist is the only thing I do. Inspiration can therefore come at any time. Furthermore, I am fortunate to be free to produce any work that comes to mind. I have no gallery owners or dealers who impose genres that the market likes. When inspiration comes, if I feel like making a painting, I make a handmade canvas and paint.
If I feel the need to make a Ritual Work, the process is much, much more complex. First of all, I inform myself in my ancient books about the precise characteristics that my Work must refer to. I do not make written plans, drafts, or anything else, but I spend days searching for and finding suitable materials. If I do not find them, I am capable of looking for them in any part of the world. For example, for the “Book of Meaningful Names”, kept in the Library of the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, an ingredient was missing to be able to perfume it with a mixture of aromas as God had dictated in the Pentateuch.
They cannot find it anywhere. I had to translate and go back in time until I discovered starting from a book from 1600 that in history up to the present day, had changed my name several times. I found it after weeks in Hungary. After finally finding all the materials, depending on what I have to do, I purify myself, go to church to bless my hands, my forehead, and start creating the Work. The realization is never simple. There are simpler and more complex processes. When I created the Sword of the Angels, between sculpting the steel, forging it, blessing it, purifying it, engraving it, and coloring it, it took me months.
What are your future projects?
In February the first exhibitions organized to celebrate my birthday, which would be February 9, 1975, will begin. Museums and galleries will present different types of my works, thus trying to give life to a complete look at my Work. The Museum of Primary Arts of Villanova di Albenga (Italy) will present in three of its locations, an exhibition of analphabetic plastics (embroideries on soft plastic), ritual masks in Mediterranean palm, and finally my embroideries on fabric.
The Formapop Gallery of Ostia (Italy) will present some of my Gio'o Dolls (dolls against loneliness), some of my 20x20 paintings, in an artistic dialogue with the artist EasyPop. The Museum of Hemp of Sant'Anatolia di Narco (Italy) will hold workshops for children until March, with many of my fabric masks as protagonists. Finally, the Cum Venio Gallery of Larciano (Italy) will exhibit my Ritual Works, together with two other artist friends who also turn 50 this year: Filippo Basetti and Andrea Mattiello.
I also have other projects in progress, those will perhaps materialize in the second part of the year. For example, Meeting Art Casa d'Aste in Vercelli (Italy), in the Casa Museo Mario Carrara, after having organized exhibitions of objects belonging to Maria Callas, the works of Christo, Robert Rauschenberg, Sebastian Matta, should present an exhibition of my work.
Interview by Fabio Pariante, X / Instagram / Website