Joseph Schiano di Lombo

The baroque flute, Joseph tells me, is the ancestor of the clarinet, the first instrument he picked up at the age of nine. But it requires less air flow and produces much softer, mellower sounds that reproduce the air of doubt that permeated the early 17th century. Indeed, the scientific discoveries of the Baroque era – Galileo’s law of falling bodies, or Kepler’s optical theories – showed how little we knew about the world around us, ushering Western society into a crisis over what was real and what was not. Famously, it’s this very scepticism that the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, sought to surmount with his scientific methods of reasoning, breaking with the otherwise fabulist and unknowable world of the Baroque.
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When I point this out, Joseph looks at me pensively. “Doubt is a strong driving force in my life,” he says. “There aren’t many things I’m sure of.” He’s 32 now, and his expansive practice doesn’t fit into any one clear category. “At times, I feel like it slows me down,” he admits. By comparison, his self-assured peers have established themselves in more straightforward ways, often wondering why Joseph – whose talent is undeniable – isn’t more successful yet. For instance, DJ and producer Myd, a member of electronic band Club Cheval, has encouraged Joseph to churn out more of his classical piano covers of pop songs by the likes of Latina legend J.Lo or French icon Mylène Farmer – a surefire way to viral fame. “Why should I? If the objective is to be famous, but famous for something I don’t feel like doing all the time, it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes I feel people prevent themselves from becoming something else.” Joseph’s ethos is one of metamorphosis: a way of never being the same.

At 15, disenchanted with the technical requirements of the clarinet – particularly that of circular breathing – Joseph turned his attention to the piano. “I was very keen,” he says. His first teacher, a Georgian pianist named Maïa Gabelaïa, was as demanding as she was glamorous, her dark hair coiffed into an impeccable bob. “I absolutely wanted to be her best student,” Joseph says. Despite his relative lateness to the instrument, he learned quickly and was soon playing technically challenging pieces such as Chopin’s ‘Barcarolle, Op. 60’.

His path became clear: he would train to enter the conservatoire. After all, why waste all that talent? A few years later, he went on to study at the one in Annecy, where he trained with experimental pianist Claudine Simon and was introduced to “musical theatre” – the set of techniques and practices at the intersection of improvisation and performance rather than the Broadway or West End variety. Joseph finally moved to Paris at 20, first to take a course at the École Normale de Musique de Paris and then to study at another conservatoire in the southern suburb of Bourg-la-Reine. The capital was an epiphany. “I quickly felt an enthusiasm come over me, after years of feeling depressed in Chambéry,” he says. But fate had other plans for the budding classical pianist.

One day, Joseph stumbled upon an open day at the no less prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in the Latin Quarter. He knew his favourite fashion designer, Yiqing Yin, had recently graduated from there, and he was intrigued to peek behind the scenes. When he did, he was stunned. “Putain!” he exclaims, recalling the copperplate engraving studios. “It was incredible what these people could do!” Joseph had always liked to draw and was pretty good at it, too. But he’d never considered fine arts as a possible career until then. On the spur of the moment, he decided to apply and – four months and many exams later – was admitted with the best score out of 3,000 applicants. “It was one of the best days of my life,” he says. “I needed that slightly illusory validation of being accepted into a top national school. I had a lot of doubts about everything, including my own abilities, so it was a huge achievement.”

Art was a happy accident, but the initial excitement started to fade. “I didn’t even know who Duchamp was,” Joseph says, remembering his imposter syndrome. “I was a little traumatised by the experience.” But fine arts offered him a chance to make his practice the sprawling, multi-disciplinary venture it is today. As he returned from a year abroad in Japan his final project, ‘Fugue sans sujet’ (Fugue Without a Subject), was emblematic of that shift. Combining drawing, writing, sculpture, ready-mades, comics and musical improvisations, the project – whose title refers to the classical music technique of the fugue, in which imitative parts in staggered stages join together to form a harmonic whole – was a nod to the artist’s flight from music to visual arts. “It’s the best title I’ve come up with so far,” he says. “It describes my whole life!”

The resulting exhibition was held in the year of his graduation at the École des Arts Décoratifs in 2017 and featured an altered cover of a novel by Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars, a copy of Sigmund Freud’s ‘La Vie Sexuelle’ with a dead insect crushed between the pages, and an Amélie-like series of ghostly photographs taken at empty photo booths. Together, these fragments playfully commented on the positive quality of absence. They also revealed Joseph’s discreet but sharp wit, and his ability to orchestrate words and images to invent a new language. (The art of the feint, of course, is yet another Baroque motif: the lyrical ruse as a strategy to negotiate the insurmountability of doubt.)

One day, Joseph was doodling some logos for a Hugo Boss campaign when he overheard the team saying they needed a stand-in pianist to feature in a forthcoming film advertisement set in the Zaha Hadid-designed Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. Out of a desire to help – and maybe out of boredom, too – the classically trained musician volunteered, and the next thing he knew, he was on a flight to Azerbaijan.

The production was an ambitious affair featuring Irish actor Jamie Dornan and Dutch model Birgit Kos. Joseph’s job was simple enough: sit there, look pretty and play a song by Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds. Clearly, that was too simple for the artist, who instead started playing his own embellished adaptation of the song. The director was so enthralled that he scrapped Arnalds’ original and sent Joseph to professionally record his own version at Abbey Road Studios in London. “Initially I was just there to come up with a logo,” Joseph laughs. “Then I became an extra and, eventually, made the music.”

After this, he took the plunge and went freelance, spending the following year providing whichever creative services were requested of him. For the Opéra National de Paris, he developed a playful campaign of sloguèmes (a portmanteau of his creation conflating slogans and poèmes). Meanwhile, for ‘Les Chemins de la philosophie’ (the national public broadcaster Radio France’s philosophy programme) he drew sassy illustrations of historical thinkers, including one of Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne pinching his friend Étienne de La Boétie’s nipple as they bathe together. “I’ve always liked imagining dirty stuff between them!” Joseph says.

That year, he also put on his first solo exhibition. Titled ‘Mysique pour Arp’, it was inspired by Franco-German Dada artist Jean Arp. “Mostly, I liked the play on words,” Joseph says (in French, “Arp” and “harp” share the same pronunciation). The show – which was held at the home of PR executive David Giroire near the Palais Royal – featured gouaches, pencil drawings, plaster casts, porcelain figurines, site-specific musical performances and a soda can that had been found atop Mount Arp Vieille in Valle d’Aosta, Italy. “What I learned from Arp,” Joseph says, “is that you have to go with the flow. Don’t ask yourself a thousand questions.”

Putting that lesson to use, Joseph returned to music, releasing two piano cover singles in 2020: the aforementioned classical reinterpretations of Jennifer Lopez’s ‘If You Had My Love’ and Mylène Farmer’s ‘Sans Contrefaçon’, using variations based on works by 19th-century composers Erik Satie and Claude Debussy. Soon after, he started working on his debut album, ‘Musique de niche’, which was inspired by his reading of feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, an advocate of deeper connections with animals and other non-human species (I suddenly regret ordering the lamb). Following her lead, Joseph decided to make music specifically for dogs. The experimental album is a portrait of an animal’s life, with the final track dedicated to his childhood labrador, Maori. “Their psychic lives are richer… I like taking the focus off our little human universe,” he says. It was also inspired by the music of ‘Twin Peaks’, composed by the late Angelo Badalamenti. Joseph only used keyboards, computer-based instruments and a sample of his father playing guitar. He found it “more democratic” that way – certainly more so than if he had used a baroque flute.

Then, as if he was getting a little bit too comfortable with music, Joseph wrote a delightfully poetic but deeply puzzling novel. ‘L’Oxymore’ was born out of a collaboration with his former teacher, graphic designer Fanette Mellier, who’d contacted him with a simple but odd request: that he write a detective novel set in the medieval town of Chaumont. When I emailed Mellier to ask about the project, she responded quickly and enthusiastically:
“I was captivated by the poems Joseph wrote alongside his drawing and music. I wanted to work with him and so I asked him to write a bizarre detective story.” Of course, Joseph was game, and needless to say, ‘L’Oxymore’ didn’t turn out as regular Poirot-style crime fiction. In fact, the book is devoid of any detectives. Instead, Joseph offers a highly conceptual and poetic take on the crime subgenre, taking out all of its central ingredients to focus on the bigger-picture movement from obscurity to clarity that you get when reading such books.

Joseph doesn’t like talking about what’s next. He tells me about the soundtrack he’s made as a collaboration with French artists Théo Mercier and Céline Peychet, but the rest, he says, is in the works. “It’s like psychoanalysis: if you start talking to people about your sessions, you never know who’s going to know your analyst.” I don’t know if I’m the analyst or the gossiper in this analogy. Either way, I insist and find out that Joseph is working with Bonnie Banane on an album inspired by pleasure, human or otherwise. Their method, he notes, seeks to escape human-centric preoccupations: “It’s a way of giving things other than ourselves the possibility of experiencing pleasure,” he says, scooping his chocolate mousse. “I think that’s where we’ll find our redemption.”