“I built myself a novel set of tools that answered the need of a direct hold on metal, as whole and wide as possible: files, of which the head was thinned in the shape of a rectangular tongue sharpened at its end, bit flatly on the whole surface or side, deepening the cuts. Cutters mounted on drills, to obtain modulation: embossing, sockets, imprints, that I also get from the use of pre-made metals.

I didn’t want to neglect the new possibilities that cutting or hollowing out the metal sheet offered: by cutting it on the outside shape of the sketch, the geometric rigidity of the frame is broken, the margins start communicating with the inside, the texture of the paper is integrated during the printing process, the composition stops being limited by the format of the engraved surface exclusively.

From the combination of the two, three, four cut-out metal sheets in different riveted metals – zinc, brass, copper, aluminium, iron – resulted in not just the relief itself, but also nuances in variations due to the different pressions and to the specific colour reactions depending on the type of metal used. In the case of the polychromatic prints, my metal sheets are constituted, like jigsaws, of dissociable elements anchored separately and then re-assembled: the print can be made in one go, without the risk that the inks might mix.

In engraving I found what is probably to me the condition of plastic imagination: the possibilities of reassessment, at the most basic level of the treatment and the choice of textures – but perhaps as well, without the enchanting colour of playful shapes, an answer to the need to break, with violence, metal’s glacial silence. Satisfying the rites of an elementary aggressiveness, my fellow countrymen of the past, the Tuscan master workers, forged, chiselled, assembled, piece by piece and with an infinite concern the terrible and wonderful armours in exile at the Metropolitan Museum.”

Paolo Boni