The project originated from the Quadro per la Sala dell’800 (Painting for the Nineteenth-Century Room), which I painted in 2008 during repeated visits to the museum’s picture gallery.
The painting originated from the colours found in the paintings of the nineteenth-century room and in particular from the flower in the hair of the woman in a Milesi painting (La Modella, 1910), which I envisaged as the palette on which the artist had contemplated his colours. It was as if that flower had become the place where he ended up cleaning his brushes, the point of reflection, his thinking in colours instead of in words. During each visit, I collected a colour and took it back to the studio with me, materialising it in a layer of paint on the canvas. My painting is the result of the superimposition of these experiences.
In 2015 when Chiara Bertola asked me to come up with a project for Mario Botta’s café I decided to go back to that painting.
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