Roberto Maria Lino
- 19 hours ago
- 3 min read
Roberto Maria Lino is an Italian artist born in Naples and based in Rome. Everything he makes is fabric, hand-sewn. His first series, Sutura, is his father's surgical gowns stitched to his own clothes. For Mare Cinereo he soaked fabric in the sea during a residency in Monaco. His most recent series, Untitled (Red Monochromes), uses only cloth from strangers, pieces he asks friends to find for him without telling him where they come from. He says the slowness of sewing stitch by stitch is the point. He had solo shows in New York and Monte-Carlo.
Q: Sutura was your first fabric series, made from your father’s surgical gowns and your own clothes. That’s a very specific place to begin. What led you there?
A: Color, especially red, was the first element I explored in my work. After that, I experimented with paper, both everyday and more personal materials, like my father’s surgical logs. Eventually, I moved to fabric, which is versatile and alive; it can transform while keeping traces of its history. Cutting and hand-sewing a T-shirt or a lab coat gives new life to a material already full of meaning, maintaining a balance between its original identity and reinterpretation.
Q: For Mare Cinereo, you submerged fabric in the sea and let the salt and sun do the work. How did that come about during your residency in Monaco?
A: The project comes from a connection with the place and my interest in memory. The sea has always been part of my life, and the residency in Monaco gave me the chance to experiment with fabric in a site-specific way. I used natural dyes and batik, then immersed the material in the sea, letting the sun and salt work with me. It’s a collaborative process with nature, where chance and transformation add new layers of history and meaning to the material.
Q: The Red Monochromes use only fabrics from strangers. What’s it like working with material you know nothing about?
A: I wanted to open up to the community. Each fabric comes from different lives and people who would probably never meet. Bringing them together in a work allows fragments of different stories to coexist: every piece has a role, and without it, the work wouldn’t exist. It’s like creating a small community, where every fragment contributes to the whole, exploring relationships and collective memory through the material itself.
Q: Everything is hand-sewn. That’s physical, repetitive. What does that slowness give you?
A: I started as self-taught in the textile field, and hand-sewing has remained my main technique because it’s versatile and can be done anywhere. The slowness is satisfying: large or small works grow stitch by stitch. The process is meditative and allows me to feel the growth of the work intimately, turning repetition into experience and creative control.
Q: Your pieces range from tiny, almost palm-sized works to massive installations. Does the scale change how you think about a piece?
A: Yes. Small works require more precision and attention to detail because their impact has to be condensed into a few centimeters. Large installations allow more freedom, with plays of voids and solids and broader spatial compositions. In both cases, I always start with a sketch. Small works need careful planning and focus, while large ones give room for more general exploration.
Q: New York, Monte-Carlo, Capri. You’ve had a busy run. Where is the work going from here?
A: It has been a busy and challenging year, but very satisfying. I’m focusing on more installation-based projects: a residency with NM Contemporary in Cortina, with a presentation at the end of August; another with Collettivo Zero and the Tramandars association in Campania after the Art Summit Residency; and a project abroad in October, just confirmed. All of them require attention to the place and the relationship with the space, expanding my research into fabrics and installations.
