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Memories of Matter
It's not easy to describe what happens to the painter who is facing a blank canvas
Often the painter thinks with his hands...
there is a special affinity between the thinking and the hands
and he cannot create something but in a practical way
He has to reach a compromise with the material
which is highly communicative
I like to think that the awareness
the material gives to the painter during the process of creation
can last over the time.
The painter has to face many questions.
I had to work with different materials, developing different subjects...
and the same subject, painted with a different material...
such as ash or engine oil...
gives origin to a completely different painting.
Ash is one of the first material I started to use
in 2004
Until that moment, I had worked with monochrome pigments
but they had not such a natural origin.
Ash is an amazing material because it is impalpable...
and without impurities.
In fact, in old rural cultures, it was used for many purposes...
to whiten clothes... to clean glass-windows... or to scatter nitrogen over the fields.
The meaning of ash is linked to a sort of liturgy of painting...
since ash and oil are purifying elements
as ash has gone through fire... the most perfect, impalpable and purifying element we can find
Besides... ash keeps the memory of wood from which it takes its origin...
and this has always deeply impressed me...
causing me to look for ash of different woods in different places...
in Italy and also abroad.
Once I came back from Canada...
with my baggage full of birch bark...
to produce a very fine ash from it.
After six years I had worked with ash
I had to find a material which, in spite of natural origins...
...was linked to the contemporary world... and to our time.
After a series of experiments I got a good result with engine oil.
Engine oil is highly pigmented...
I mean the one that has been used in the car.
I like to think that the materials i use keep a collection of memories...
Memories that remind us of a story, a biology, a biography of all people who have got in touch with these materials.
Darker is the material, harder is the creation of white.
So if the dark material is highly pigmented...
...then getting the light... the white... will be very difficult.
Before discovering ash, oil and mud, as the main pigments for my work
I used pure pigments...
...such as burnt sienna, lampblack, raw sienna or yellow ochre...
I wondered what was the origin of these earthly pigments...
and indeed, the earth of Siena's land has that particular reddish shade...
characterizes the colour "raw sienna".
So i wondered... why I had to work with a tube of paint
when I could have a relation with a landscape, a real and geographical place...
with a story, with people, with a culture?
I think that it is more interesting to take back this performance aspect of painting..
and to collect, in particular places, materials
that can communicate the meaning of a work of art.
Fernando Pessoa used to say...
that the things are something more than the time that seems to change them...
or the space that seems to include them...
And he emphasize the word “ARE”
I'm not used to make symbols of ash... oil... or other materials...
I don't make use of them because they are symbols... but just because they "ARE".
The man of land is something new in my work.
Actually it's the result of a very simple consideration
linked to the image of the man created with the clay
representing an ancient iconography and shared by many religions.
I was attracted to the idea of working with a material like earth...
taken, in this case, in Tuscany.
Going to a particular place and taking a particular material...
put the subject in a wider universe.
Working with the linen paper makes the image meaningful...
even after I painted it.
So the painting represents just the beginning...
Than the world of image manipulation opens new meanings.
I like to play with paper and make origami
because, in this way...
I can break the image in many lines
that represent a hidden shape
a shape that existed before the image itself.
My last action is to make white signs on the painting.
After tears and cuts...
the subject of the work needs a layer that make all elements match.
Actually it makes the painting dynamic...
it defines the direction of the light...
and catches the attention of the spectator...
that's how it make all elements match.
When I finish the work I say:
“well it must be this way" The white sign comes from a direction
but then I decide which meaning that sign must have.
So first I represented a bird's-eye view of the subject
then I added the human traces inside the landscape.
I mean, even if the human figure doesn't appear in the landscape...
but there are the traces.
I realized that there is no difference between the landscape and the human figure
above all according my style.
I wanted to make this idea clear with a series called...
"Aleifar Canon"
which refers to Greek canon, not from a formal point of view...
I'm not interested in
but from a conceptual point of view.
There are no contacts between the landscape and the human figure...
...they keep a constant dialogue without catching each other.
I've always considered the whale like a living landscape
because human eye can't see it as a whole...
something gets lost in the memories...
I remember that when I was a child I lived at my grandparents' house
and it was the typical grandparents' house
full of stuff, of carpet... with a very oppressive decoration
and full of heavy furniture.
When i slept there... i heard my grandparents talking in the next room
but their voices were muffled... as if they came from the deep sea.
Well i remember that i thought about Whales Song in those moments...
Every painting is linked to a memory of my childhood
what i called “the plans of memory”
I mean the memory of the plans of all houses we have lived... in our life...
Plans which we have learnt and then forgotten...
"The strange house in the woods" represents a collection of images of the woods
above Bressanone, in Trentino-Alto Adige region
I have often walked in the woods and once I realized that while I was walking
I used to gaze the earth, the roots of the trees
as if I was looking for a way that didn't exist
a new goal, a place to reach...
Actually "The Strange House in the Woods" represents this place...
that's why I left this title even for the works where the house doesn't appear.
When I walked in the woods I felt I was heading for an unreal place...
or for a place that was there in the past...
Painting is a dimension which can't be completely understood
...there is always a mysterious side too difficult to express...