Studio Portraits

Description

Artist book
by Michele Servadio
Size 16.8 x 24
248 pages on Munken Linx 130 gsm
Stapled + paperback
Cover in 300 gsm Munken Linx
Dust jacket in 4/0 on coated paper with matte lamination
ISBN: 9791281835290

Studio Portraits is an editorial project dedicated to the work of Michele Servadio, an evolution of the artist’s first book How to Forget About a Song, produced and curated by Varsi in collaboration with Paola Pompili.
While the first publication was a handcrafted, intimate, and tactile object, this new edition broadens the perspective and offers a more layered and conscious reading of his research. The volume gathers years of photographic practice born from the need to preserve what tattooing—ephemeral by its very nature—leaves on the body. In the portraits taken in his English studio, which is both home and creative laboratory, tattooing enters a broader system where painting, sculpture, performance, and text intertwine within a coherent universe, where each work nourishes the others. At the center of Servadio’s work lies metamorphosis: of the body, of space, of identity. Skin and film become symbolic boundaries between interior and exterior, between present and memory. Photography does not merely document; it transforms, it rescues an archaic, ritual gesture from loss and delivers it to the archive, restoring it a broader temporal dimension. Through an essay and an interview edited by Daniela Collu, the book highlights the tension that runs throughout the artist’s research: holding together different practices within a cohesive system, building a recognizable language without belonging to a single category, transforming experience into vision. Studio Portraits tells the story of a compact and constantly evolving creative universe, where memory, mark, and body coexist in a necessary and radical balance.