Pol Petrino
Pol Petrino is an artist and sculptor whose practice draws from natural materials—earth, wood, and stone—to investigate the fragile tension between permanence and impermanence. His work takes the form of performative installations, often grounded in ritual and in direct dialogue with the landscape. With a background shaped by travel and cross-cultural immersion, Petrino approaches sculpture as a process of listening, connecting, and returning: a cyclical movement that reflects the natural decay and transformation of matter. His creations are not static objects, but experiences—living processes that carry the memory of places, energies, and people.
In conversation with Pol Petrino during the exhibition Oltre la pietra at Castelgrande, Bellinzona.
What is the purpose in your work?
What mainly led me to do what I do today in my daily life is the desire to experience and
get to know as many places and cultures as possible; to truly connect with them. When you
travel, you often only touch the surface of a place, but the desire to create pushes you out of your
comfort zone. It makes you absorb as much as possible in order to eventually form your own
perspective. That's where this journey started: travelling and searching for something that
conveys beauty. Not beauty in an aesthetic sense, but beauty as positivity, as positive energy.
Then came the connection to my medium, which is natural elements like earth and stone. When
you go to a place, just by touching its materials, like running your hand along a cliff or the ground
as you walk, you already establish a connection with it. Nothing concrete might come from it, but
it’s still a contact. From that came the idea of expressing the culture of a place through the materials of that place. That led me to research how to use raw materials and how to turn that into
an experience for the viewer.
For me, what matters most is not the final piece or its aesthetic, but the process that leads to
what the viewer ultimately sees. That process becomes a ritual, one that connects with the culture
of the place. What I find beautiful is that every place shapes its own process, depending on where
you are. Each has its own color, which is then transferred to the artwork. The ritual always plays
with a kind of duality: death and birth. It's a form of rebirth.
Tell us about the project you exhibited at Oltre la pietra
What I brought to Matazz was grounded in a desire to work with the material of the place;
to try to express what I experienced there. What I felt from that place, the castle, was this
sense of eternity. A feeling of something eternal. But in truth, we discover that this is just a human
desire to leave a lasting mark. In reality, nothing is truly eternal: neither we ourselves, nor the
castle, nor even the land itself.
The idea was to express this duality in a sculpture, between eternity and the fragility of the
artwork. A volume, a shape we can link to human intervention, like a parallelepiped: a pure, non
natural form that begins to disintegrate. At first glance, it seems solid, as if it’s always been there, this compact earth. But it will collapse before our eyes. It’s a body that will slowly begin to die.
Even now, after seeing the piece over the past few days, it still feels like it’s crumbling in on itself,
dying. But at the same time, the logs inside seem to rise; you don’t quite know whether they are
dying or being reborn. Again, the idea of death and rebirth can be seen simultaneously (...).
From where the idea itself was born. It’s a cycle of death and rebirth, a
continuous metamorphosis. Now the idea that this sculpture could remain here longer is tied to
witnessing that collapse. What I hope is that I can one day return it to the fields it came from, as
loose earth again, no longer compacted, ready to be reused and to grow new things. To generate
new culture from the earth that was once used for another purpose.
So it had a life, underwent a metamorphosis, took on different functions and forms. That is
metamorphosis.
What’s the role of the artist today? For me,
being an artist means sharing my experiences. Some people might not share through the media;
they might just share within their family or close circle, and that remains in its own little world. But
I think an artist today should transmit beauty. We live in a world where beauty, even in its simplest
forms, is often undervalued. Beauty brings positivity into the world. Creating something hateful, or
without the will to transmit beauty, has consequences; it sends negativity back out.
So we should always have a vision, a process that leads us toward it. We often think that once we
have a vision, we can then justify it with a process. But I believe it’s the opposite: only after the
study and research of something can a vision take form.