Giorgio Soressi

Giorgio Soressi recalls drawing at an early age in his family’s home in Cremona, in northern Italy. “I was, I think, 3 years old. Very, very little,” Soressi says. “I began to draw on the floor with white gesso. You know white gesso? And now I paint, also, all over the walls in my studio. I write, I paint, I design on the wall. I like, a lot, going on the wall. Also the floor.”

Not much has changed. These days, whenever he’s not traveling, Soressi rides his bicycle a mile to his studio in Treviso, just north of Venice, where he not only draws and paints on as many surfaces as he can find but also designs furniture and, most of all, plays guitar.

“I love, absolutely, music,” he says. “Every moment of my life is music. Everything I see and I think, I report everything in the music. The stars in the sky go around in a melody, the river – everything is music. The color is vibration, is music. When we meet people, we make music.”

His father was a concert violinist, and there was always music in the house. At 13, Soressi picked up the guitar, and by the time he was 17, he was playing professionally in bars and clubs. Eventually, the requirements of domestic life came calling.

“At a certain point, there is the wife, there is a little girl,” he says. “I decided to stop going around to play. And so I take my first talent, to design, and I begin to design. I don’t have school. I don’t have any of this. I work.”

Soressi became a prolific designer, working mostly for Italian clients. The work, besides furniture, covers a diverse range, including lighting, rugs, ceramics and glassware (a particular favorite of his).

“When I make a thing, all the experience, all my years, all the people I have met, all my music go inside it. If you make a thing without soul, it is nothing. I think everything we make also, if you don’t put something of yourself into it, this thing is nothing.”

His style leans heavily to the modern but is not bound by it. “To be modern but also with respect for the older, the past,” he says. “This is more or less what I think when I do something. I don’t change the world with a sofa. I go into the world. Why go into the world with stupidity, arrogance, violence? It is better to go into the world with simplicity.”

An intensely private man, Soressi cannot be found on social media, nor does he have a website. “I stay in my studio to paint, to design, to think, to play. This is my life. It’s nothing particular, but I like this.”