I’ve never really seen myself as an artist. I feel more like an image-engineer or a haphazard philosopher. I work on a conceptual basis in an ever-expanding range of media—from oil paint to stained glass and performance art. Recently I made a stuffed animal of a giant earthworm and meditated in the middle of Times Square for 24 hours. My portfolio makes no sense.

I grew up between San Francisco and Florence, Italy. My background is in digital design, but my heart has always been with analog media. I moved to New York last year for my MFA in figurative painting at New York Academy of Art. We paint nude models from life every day and memorize all the bones and muscles in the body. It’s awesome. I’m learning the “rules” so I can break them better.

I’ve always been interested in how image-making overlaps with creative problem-solving. For the past two years, I’ve been working on a weird little card game that does exactly that. It’s called Exquisite Corpse.

What began as a sketchbook experiment has since evolved into a project that fuses everything I love—spontaneity, visual absurdity, connection, and strategic play.

Where did the idea for Exquisite Corpse come from?

The name comes from a phrase by the Surrealists who first played a version of this game in the 1920s: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” Traditionally it’s played by folding a piece of paper, with players taking turns drawing sections of a continuous body (or writing lines of text) without seeing what the others have created.

I grew up in a family of artists and have been playing the drawing game for as long as I can remember. I wanted to bring the collaborative absurdity of the Surrealists into the modern world—in a form that’s tactile, social, strategic, and slightly unhinged.

Why revive the Surrealist game? What does it mean to put your own spin on it?

Exquisite Corpse taps into a spirit of imaginative exploration that, as adults, we too often neglect. I designed this card game to make that playful visual discovery accessible to everyone, not just artists. In playtests, the best part is watching people lose themselves in that process.

How does the game actually work?

The Exquisite Corpse deck includes 54 colored pencil drawings:

52 body parts + 2 wildcard bandaids.

All body parts connect at small or large openings, and bandaids mend loose ends.

With four distinct game modes, you can build corpses collaboratively, competitively, or alone in your room at 2am.

What looks like nonsense is actually a finely tuned network—one that’s just barely solvable.

What was the hardest part of designing the game?

The complexity of the game’s logic! Designing this thing sent me down the rabbit hole of graph theory (wtf is that) and nearly drove me insane. But cracking that code was one of the most rewarding parts of the process.

What was it like to treat this both as an artwork and as a product?

I’ve found that artwork tends to lose idiosyncrasy when commercialized for a broader audience, which can pose a real challenge to its narrative and conceptual depth. Exquisite Corpse gave me a rare opportunity to preserve creative expression while still making a sellable product.

The plan is to commission different artists to illustrate future versions of the deck, each with their own theme and visual language. (Keep an eye out for Exquisite Corpse: The Animal Pack—we’ll reveal the artist soon!)

I’m learning to approach the business process as an art form in its own right. What if enterprise were a medium, like paint? Isn’t it a vehicle for this concept just as much as my original pencil drawings were?

How does Exquisite Corpse fit into your practice as a painter and conceptual artist?

I’ve always been drawn to interactive art—it’s a dance between expression and functionality. That interest is what led me to the world of design, and later to this card game. I love making images, but I want the viewer to have an active say in what they become.

I’ve built jigsaw puzzles, kites, carpets, paper dolls…I think interaction (whether physical or just psychological) has the ability to break down the barriers between subject and object.

To me, art is a microcosm of life. It’s an act of conception and evolution. It’s a testament to the tension between self and other, between spirit and matter. And it’s a chance for both maker and viewer to unite these sets of opposites in the experience of it.

Exquisite Corpse is about connection. It’s more than just a card game—it’s a puzzle, a playground for the imagination, and a collaborative creative experience.

The most exciting part of this project is seeing how it grows and evolves in other people’s hands. We’ve been testing it in living rooms and art studios all around the world—and this is just the beginning.

On October 1st, Exquisite Corpse goes live on Kickstarter. If you want to join the experiment, you can follow the campaign HERE.

or pre-order a deck at exquisitecorpsedeck.com

Consider it an invitation to the absurd.