Davide Furno
Davide Furno is a master wax modeller born in Biella in 1963. After graduating from Milan’s IED, he worked for many years as a graphic designer and advertiser, combining this profession with his passion for craftsmanship, mainly water gilding.
Serendipitously, in 1996, he discovered a collection created by master Francesco Garnier Valletti, a wax modeller specializing in flowers and ornamental fruits, who worked as a decorator in all the main European courts: it was his chance to approach an art he was destined to never leave. For years, he intensely studied and experimented, learning Valletti’s masterful techniques, and further refining his method. For his amazing creations he uses the natural products that Valletti himself had indicated: resins, animal and plant based waxes, plasters, powders, both for the paste and for the finishing paints. "With these I create the mould, in which then I pour a boiling mixture of resins and waxes. Thus, I get the raw fruit, which I then paint and shine with extreme patience until, after 8-10 coats of white lead and paints, and about 8 weeks of processing, I get a fake fruit difficult to tell apart from the real one.
In addition to Valletti’s technique, I naturally became interested in researching and acquiring the various recipes used by artists to model wax – from Vasari’s original one to those dating back to the Enlightenment coming from Florence and Bologna’s laboratories – with which I create collections of citrus, fruits, vegetables and decorative compositions." In his workshop in Biella, specialized in creating prototypes and models for scientific and decorative purposes, Furno creates hyperrealistic wax fruit models for museums, universities, private collections, advertising and scenography. His artworks exude a very special charm, somewhere between meticulous realism and melancholic poetry, created employing a technique just about unique worldwide.
