The Lab
A story of unexpected requests, testing, mistakes, investment and ever-new questions.
GLAB did not begin with major investment or a predetermined path. Before 2007, Cristian and a friend almost bought a tobacconist’s shop, but the proposal fell through. What looked like a failed project gave rise to another idea: his brother Samuele had studied graphic design. With the help and sacrifice of their parents, they opened a small 50-square-metre copy shop in central Correggio in 2007.
At first there were graphics, plotter prints, T-shirts, mugs and the ordinary work of a copy shop. After about eighteen months to two years, GLAB gradually moved away from public-facing work and focused on companies. Banners, catalogues, corporate communication and then exhibition installations followed. Requests, machinery and spaces all grew.
A request to replicate a texture begins months of testing. When the client’s project stops, GLAB’s research continues. New printing technologies and the METIS system enter the laboratory: the scanner captures the material and METIS software generates the maps. These experiments also begin the path that will lead to Art Clones.
Requests no longer fit a single category. Surface samples, material reproductions, installations and bespoke work require the laboratory to connect different tools and expertise. GLAB finds its identity in this space between disciplines.
With Art Clones, colour, texture, depth and traces of time are read as parts of one system. Reproduction does not stop at photographic appearance: it becomes a physical object built through capture, testing, printing and manual finishing.
In 2020, GLAB captured Rutilio Manetti’s “The Capture of Saint Peter” at ultra-high definition to produce a replica. Years later, the scan became part of the journalistic and television investigation into the painting’s possible correspondence with a work stolen in 2013. Its definition made it possible to analyse craquelure, restorations and details around the torch. GLAB explained its work on television without taking a position on the controversy. In February 2026, Vittorio Sgarbi was acquitted of money laundering for insufficient evidence. For the laboratory, the point remains technical: the quality of the capture made it possible, years later, to observe minute surface details.
After the visibility gained through this story, enquiries for Art Clones arrive not only from Italy but also from abroad and other continents. It is not the result of a plan devised at a desk: it is the consequence of years of work and of a project that, at a precise moment, shows the public what the laboratory can do.
Today printing, ultra-high-resolution capture, digital processing, Art Clones, rendering materials and GLAB Anamorphia coexist in the same laboratory. The current 240 square metres are no longer enough, and another change of space is already planned.
Every time GLAB learned how to do something, it began asking what else might be possible with that knowledge. The space will change and technologies will continue to evolve, but the method remains the same: observe, test and connect different skills.
We started with fifty square metres and one printer.