Collector’s Frame #1: LORENZO PERINI NATALI

My collection began almost by chance, the way meaningful things often do.
It was 2015, and I was studying Visual Arts at NABA in Milan. My days unfolded between the university, the Navigli district, and museums. I spent time in galleries, artist studios, and openings that felt more like promises than exhibitions.
I still remember the exact moment it all started: I saw a piece by Andrei Molodkin, the Russian artist who had represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2009. It was a powerful work, raw, almost surgical in its aesthetic. I asked for the price. For the first time, an artwork felt within reach. After some hesitation, I bought it. I installed it in my small apartment in Milan, right beside the window where I could watch the trams go by.

From there, everything unfolded naturally, or perhaps necessarily.

I started collecting instinctively, but with a gaze that grew sharper each day. Some works came from friends and fellow students, others from artists I met in their studios. But I also owe a great deal to those who guided me: curators, established artists, museum directors. People who taught me that a collection is never just accumulation; it is a language. A unique voice, built piece by piece, like words in a sentence that eventually resembles you.

My taste has always followed a clear trajectory.
Minimalism, conceptual art, industrial photography, cold materials, metallic structures. I am drawn to the aesthetics of efficiency, silence, and thought.
Today, my collection includes around 100 works acquired over the past decade, spanning painting, sculpture, video, drawing, and installation. Some still live with me in my current apartment, larger now, finally, which I purchased in 2019. Others are stored in a space I purchased three years ago. Because collecting also means confronting space, considering time, organizing rotation.

Maybe it all goes back even further.

I come from a family with an industrial background. Before fully dedicating myself to art, I spent three years working in our family business, which operated in Brazil, Italy, and the United States, producing industrial machinery for the paper, sterilization, and yachting industries.
These were severe, functional environments where every component existed for a reason. I believe that perspective stayed with me, a certain fascination with engineering, precision, and the mechanics of matter.

It is no coincidence that my thesis at NABA focused precisely on the relationship between art and industry. From Duchamp to Jean Tinguely, from Donald Judd to today’s robotically controlled installations, art has always been in dialogue with machines and systems. And I wanted my collection to serve as a personal response to that ongoing dialogue.

Over time, I acquired works by artists who embody this vision.
Eva & Franco Mattes, for example, with their post-digital aesthetic. Wolfgang Tillmans , with a hypnotic photograph of an airplane window, Yngve Holen’s iconic car rim, Vincenzo Castella, my professor, of whom I own two pieces: one on a strike at Malpensa, and another from his industrial series.
Each work is like a puzzle piece. Seemingly independent, yet bound by a shared tension, a hidden code that ties everything together.

Then in 2021, I felt that collecting was no longer enough.

I needed to produce, to generate, to give something back. That is how PROGETTO LUDOVICO came to life, a non-profit organization I founded to support the creation of artworks exploring the relationship between art and industry.
We have completed ten projects so far, following every stage, from artist selection (thanks to a scientific committee I am part of) to production, installation, and logistics.

I like to think of PROGETTO LUDOVICO as a natural extension of the collection, the same gaze made public, shared, transformed into opportunity. A way to support artistic research, help artists exhibit, and collectively find funding, space, and partners.

It always starts there, with direct dialogue with artists.

Studio visits are still the most vital part of my journey. hours spent talking artists about their research and art production. It is in those conversations, among drawings, models, and disassembled engines, that my motivation is reignited. That is where the desire to continue begins. To collect. To shape a coherent narrative, one piece at a time.

And when I look back at that first purchase, that instinctive decision to bring a work into my home, I realize I was not just buying an object.
I was setting a process in motion. A relationship with art that still continues today, shaped by choices.
A collection that became a vision. And a vision that turned into a practice.

And maybe, deep down, I never really stopped being that student, still looking for something to begin with.

Lorenzo Perini Natali