GRAFFITI TESSILI - Unique Pieces by Giulio Caponi

The thread of storytelling. From journalist to textile artist: Giulio Caponi writes rugs like emotional reportage. Unique pieces tell hand-sewn memories.

Who said writing has to be done with a pen? Giulio Caponi uses a needle. His words do not flow in ink but emerge from felt and carpet, cut, chosen, stitched. By hand. 

Carpets become our memory, encompassing experiences, emotions, and memories.
Giulio Caponi is currently experiencing an artistic season of extraordinary intensity and fruitfulness. Each of his works, unique and unrepeatable, emerges from the memories his soul explores. Whether expressed through postcards, animal figurines, exotic landscapes, or abstract thoughts, each carpet is born from a creative impulse. A gesture that takes shape in a watercolor sketch, then painstakingly translated onto the textile medium through embroidery—cross-stitch or stem stitch. Familiar and scholastic languages, fragments of memory are broken down into moments, stitched together stitch by stitch to form veritable textile monuments.

Poet and artist Giulio Caponi states: “I like to remember the authenticity of a form of expression that is becoming extinct with the arrival of the digital world and artificial intelligence. We have created an image of our ancestors from the objects they left us, and so will the archaeologists of the future with ours. This is what my works are: messages from the past!” 

Postcards, records, sounds, the must-have temporary tattoos of our childhood... everything is memory, remembrance.
This is how POSTCARDS were born, to tell an imaginary story: “With the postcard, when I write, I begin to invent short messages that, after long days of travel, will reach a recipient I would have liked to know. Invented addresses between stamps and postmarks issued by my publishing house. I imagine correspondences that were sometimes impossible when the postcard had not yet been invented, or between characters from different eras, some deceased, some alive, like ‘To Juliet’: Romeo writes to his beloved after meeting Shakespeare.” Giulio Caponi

With a past as a traveller and newspaper correspondent, Giulio Caponi has let himself be carried away by the call of poetry and material, weaving memory and textures to weave pages full of meaning. Each of his rugs is a story to be touched, in which emotions and memories are amplified “For me embroidering is like observing a vowel under a microscope. It is like magnifying the sound fraction of a word.”

His story begins almost by accident, in Spain. A correspondent in Barcelona to document the '92 Olympic Games, Giulio Caponi met Dominique Torrent, a fashion designer, who would become his wife and partner in artistic adventures. “An architect asked us for a solution to cover an ugly floor. I was writing poetry, she was a designer: from there the first embroidered carpet was born. A gesture born of chance, which changed everything.” Since then, the artist has continued to weave words and images, turning everyday objects into silent witnesses.

His works, carpets and tapestries, “are messages in a bottle, textile graffiti that perhaps one day someone will rediscover, as archaeologists do today with objects from the past.” 

His studio, in Brescia, is a quiet place filled with color: felt, carpeting, balls of Sardinian wool dyed with flowers, roots and bark, sketches, watercolors. Each work stems from a feeling, often from nostalgia. “I use watercolor to fix the idea. It is my way of thinking.” Yet, Giulio Caponi has no academic art training, only a long solitary practice. “I was struck by the watercolors of designers Garouste and Bonetti in the 1990s, I wanted to try it myself. It became my natural language.”

The creative process does not stop at the drawing: each piece is executed by him, stitch by stitch. He especially loves cross stitch and grass stitch “Doubt and correction are also part of the act. It is important that I do the stitching. The work changes as I do it. It evolves. Like me.” Giulio Caponi’s identity eludes categories: artist? poet? artisan? “I wouldn’t know in which box to put my work. There is certainly a manual component, but also a strong poetic drive. It is an expression that holds head, hands and heart together.” 
His rugs are multilayered stories. Objects that evoke journeys – real, mental or emotional – and that tell, in their own way, about the time that passes. And what remains.