No Curves is the tape artist who mods video games, puts his hands on the bike of a six-time world champion and designs the anchoring system of a mural. All in the same way. If he can do it – if he knows how to do it – it is because before rolling out adhesive tape and being courted by the brands that ask him to come up with a project for them, he collected sawdust, used the planer and learned how to take measurements.

“No Curves comes from the land of woodchip, where people work hard and pay taxes”, they said of him on the day he opened his exhibition at Palazzo Pirelli, in Milan (“Movimento Geometrico”, until February the 16th), in Lombardy Region’s Exhibition Centre. In the rooms, we find the most important works of the last 15 years. On the streets, freshly customized trams for Maxi Sport, the sports retailing group celebrating its new store with a new graphic identity, created by the artist.

No Curves sets the record straight: “I come from Brianza, that’s true, but that woodchip means something else: a journey started from the bottom, where getting to the top has nothing to do with success, but what you have learned along the way, about yourself and your ability to materialise your ideas”. Webelieve in angles and straight lines, his inner motto, which is also a statement of intent, always running through his words. It is a forma mentis, his artistic trait.

No Curves, with the sharp look of someone with roots in Eastern Europe, trainedin one of those small companies that make the design district great. “If you start out where things are achieved by hard work, you learn that results only come with work. Hard work. Creativity is innate, it’s true, but if you don't practice, it doesn’t grow”. Practice means direct contact with the substance: “It’s nice to talk about philosophy, but you also have to understand the nature of the materials you use, what their density is, what to combine them with, what their durability is. How much energy it takes to achieve a result. And when fatigue will get the better of you, because it’s part of the game too”.

Obsessed with building supplies and DIY stores, where he can spend entire days discovering the latest textures of rubber gloves, he talks about how important the advice of those who deal with cements, adhesives and resins every day is: more than architects, the workers. “I always take care of the layout of my work: I draw and make scale models, like interior designers, including every detail in the mock-ups. I am only instinctive in the performance; conceptually, on the other hand, I have the mindset of a designer”.

Heaps of paper and unique pieces – for example the wooden desk he made years ago for the Bunkerhaus exhibition at Seminato Arte – await him in the studio, among the utility knives and dozens of boxes containing adhesive tape, many of which are only worth a few cents, while others arrive from manufacturers who ask him to test them. He says: “Look at my hands: I’ve cut myself two thousand times, but they are perfect. It’s incredible: I cut adhesive tape all day long and my skin shows no trace of scars”. Then he returns to our conversation about the ethics of hard work and the aesthetics of being fussy: “I thought: now there’s this total frenzy about NFTs. Cool. But it's good to know that among the many advantages of NFTs, there is also a downside: they make you believe that easy money is there for the taking, if you only know how to get it. But the opposite is also true: just as it appears, it can also disappear”.

Son of a generation used to face-to-face discussion, rather than rambling on social media, he returns to the law of the tape: “In geometry there are no escape routes, only rules: for me, that’s the only right way to be”. He has given himself rules, at work and in life: “To set boundaries for ourselves helps avoiding inconsistencies”, which basically means “never betray. One’s ideas, one’s people, one’s art. If I use adhesive tape, it becomes the protagonist, I stay one step behind, I only need my hand and my body to pull it. Even when I transfer the work to the digital world: without recognisability there is no style, whatever the intended use”. Stick to the plan, he tells himself every day. Come and work with us, Adidas, BMW and Mercedes, Red Bull, the Science and Technology Museum in Milan and the Barbican in London tell him. 

How do you maintain a balance between free art and private clients?
“I put everything on the same level. In time, I’ve realised that the important thing is to simplify: I try to guarantee the same quality, both visually and practically, whatever I do”. He quotes Daniel Arsham, the artist who crossed Pikachu with a sculpture of himself in a campaign for Uniqlo, and then transformed a 1986 Porsche 930 Turbo, while maintaining the exact same look. “In some cases, the term artist is too simplistic: in practice, we have gone much further”, he says. “When you choose your medium of expression and you are faithful to it, there is no such thing as art, galleries or foundations; there is only your world and the contamination it generates”. 

He shows me the cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon on his mobile phone and says: “Let’s take that prism with the beam of light: everything that passes through that door comes out the other side, straight into a No Curves’ universe. A transformative filter? Not exactly. I like the idea of crossing over, of something migrating from a jacket to glasses, to car wrapping, even to dishes. When you start, you can’t stop: Keith Haring knew that well”.

Indeed, No Curves moves on tracks that take him in very different directions. Where does he start from when he thinks of a project? The materials, the image or the place where the work will be contextualised? “Do you want to know the truth?” he asks in turn. “From a vision: within minutes I have a clear picture of what I want to do. In a flash. The complicated phase is the design: it can take months to bring the idea to life, to understand how to materialise it”. He thinks of Frank Gehry’s tower for Luma Arles, the creative campus designed in Provence and opened last year. “What we see is the final result, but how did he get there? I went to look at the first sketches, the first materials that were chosen. It’s incredible how a cell becomes a body. But I think there is always a vision at the start. How to make it shine is the second part of the work”.