Style Magazine, Corriere della sera, 2021

Short featuring articole about my series ‘Contrived objects’ made with tennis rackets on the ‘Style Magazine, Corriere della Sera.
(February-March issue, 2021)

Daily correspondences
Tennis rackets become human faces that observe us through fuses and copper wires.

EFFECTS OF URBAN LOCKDOWN: looking around the house, discovering everyday objects, and transforming them into works of art. This is how Leonardo Ulian, an Italian creative based in London, interpreted old tennis rackets and various types of electronic materials. The result is Contrived Objects, a series of rackets that, reworked with copper wire, valves, and fuses to replace the original racket net, resemble stylized and ironic human faces “where the physiognomy is manifested thanks also to an anomaly called pareidolia, the mechanism that leads our brain to connect things and objects of all kinds with familiar shapes, in my case, sweetly dystopian human faces,” says Ulian. Electronic components are metaphors: there are resistors that limit the flow of current, capacitors, which are small places to store voltages, and then microchips, which “are icons of the 20th century for me; they look like little insects with many legs, they disappear and hide from our eyes, but they are everywhere.” Favorite tennis player? “I don’t have one, I admire those who, with an imaginative gesture, break the racket.” (LUCA ROSCINI)