Photo Haiku of Toni Piccini

Toni Piccini

The Haiku Foundation honors the work of contemporary masters of the dual art of haiga: visual image wedded to haiku. This month’s featured artist is Toni Piccini.

Toni Piccini was born in Trieste, Italy, where he lives.

In his work, he says, he strives to reach a point where text, image and font (with its variables) give birth to a harmonious ensemble, where the result is the total of the fusion of the three elements, which still retain their own particularities.

To do this he frequently uses photos that aren’t the visual expression of the text, but that travel on the same level of vibration. His haiku are not composed upon seeing the image: the two elements are born separately and matched from there.

His haiga exhibition Costruir levando (Building through removing), at the 13th International Poetry Festival in Genoa, Italy, 2007, was the first ever presented in Italy. He also has had exhibitions in Hungary (at the “World Haiku Festival” in Pécs, 2010, in Budapest and other towns among which is a permanent exhibition in Keszthely), Croatia and the United States.