Oby One (whose real name was Roberto Zaiacometti) was born in Ivrea in 1948 and lived in Cascinette d’Ivrea in the province of Turin until his death in 2015. Oby, the name the artist was given by his friends, is an abbreviation of Roberto to which he added One to emphasize the original uniqueness of his production. He created the signature for his works by replacing the two Os with an eye. Oby One started drawing in the mid-seventies during the work breaks at the printing company where he worked. When he was near retirement age, in the early years of the twenty-first century, he began to produce three-dimensional works of art: Triumphs, Trophies and, above all, mythical Cities of the Future, constructions of realistic worlds. Maquettes built from scratch using waste materials, these Cities of the Future in which the imagination runs wild, in which the more or less everyday objects are the tools of a radical eclecticism that absorbs everything in a fantastic, happy and rhythmically intense “vision”, are the means through which the artist satisfies his need for eloquence and to flow into expressiveness. The paradoxical realism of these works lies precisely in the heteroglossia of the language so that each material used not only composes the whole object but speaks to us as a fragment of the absence of what it comes from and of a fragmented being, the artist, and of his ability to recompose himself through the idea, the intuition, the game, losing himself in an immense polymorphism.
