Friends & Collectors

"My small objects narrate the world," says Sobrero, and with these worlds he glosses the particular spell that his art holds for writers and bibliophiles, and for anyone who lives by the magic of books. As always, life imitates art: Sobrero enjoys the admiration and friendship of some of the most highly respected literati of Europe.

Italo Calvino and Sobrero: Fellow travelers in the cosmos.
The two artists have had endless conversations about the desire to shrink the world… The two artists had endless conversations about the desire to shrink the world and to transform it, as Sobrero says, "…into something so smal -l-even if very complex-- that you can hold it tenderly in your hands."
    The eccentric Qfyfq narrates the world into being in Calvino's Cosmicomics, a creation epic that takes creativity as its starting point, to say the least. Sobrero is a long-time devotee of this elastic and joyous book, and shares with Calvino the love of looking back and forth from microcosm to macrocosm, mirrors reflected in mirrors.
    Invisible Cities is another Calvino creation that charts a universe parallel to the domain where Sobrero dwells. This, perhaps, is Calvino's own minima libraria, an arcane collection of minutely imagined cameo-geographies where the privacy and primacy of memory construct a personal landscape as dizzying in its depth as it is precious in its detail.

The friendship with Franco Maria Ricci, publisher and mover of the Italian literary scene, is a story that has shaped the public view of Sobrero's art…

Dada Rosso, critic and journalist from Torino, offers her reflections on why writers love Ettore Sobrero's tiny bookcases…