Maria Morganti. Time, Body, and Colour

Proposal for a monograph publication about the artist sent to Bloomsbury Publishing, Londo.

This volume examines the complete work of Italian artist Maria Morganti by focusing on the three essential traits of her practice: her relationship with time from a methodological and ontological perspective; the performative and affective aspect of her painting process; her intense and intimate use of colour.
For Morganti, colour has a strong material and empathic dimension that leads both to a slow stratification of paint, and to the sedimentation of the mind and the self. The colour she uses is always the same and yet it changes every day. It originates from a bowl that gathers the leftovers of her previous painting session, to which she adds a slightly different nuance: this produces a renewal rather than an accumulation of colour.
Morganti only paints with one colour per day — a colour that, significantly, keeps the memory of all the colours she has used before. She uses three different surfaces: the new canvas that will become part of her Sedimentations series; the unique canvas of her Infinite Painting, which condenses all the layers of colour she has ever worked with, like a sedimentary stone; and the wooden strip of her Diaries, an ongoing “horizontal” archive of her daily practice. However, painting is not the only medium with which the artist operates: photography, sculpture and drawing/print also play an important role in the construction of her material and conceptual universe. In addition to this, the other crucial aspect for Morganti is devoting herself to all those activities — writing, archiving, sharing, displaying — that relate herself and her work to the other (the viewer).