"Created as a ‘private thing’, each work of art has to first spend a period of time waiting in order to become a more or less ‘public thing’…"

Elio Vittorini, ‘Diario in pubblico’, July 1948

 
This work consists of a 275cm-high and 475cm-wide plasterboard panel mounted on a wall onto which 33 screws painted in different colours have been attached. Each colour indicates the height to hang the paintings following a precise installation format. At the foot of the wall are four wooden platforms the same width as the paintings. Completing the work is a drawing in pencil and pen on which the key to the screws is displayed. There is also a small pencil work in the right-hand margin of the wall where the heights relating to the sizes of the painting are marked: Body, Half-bust, Portrait, Hand, Diary.
 
The wall contains some installation possibilities:
1-     Each painting is already a whole: one painting hung in the centre of the wall.
2-     Seriality, repetition, as though I were painting a single painting, splitting it ad infinitum: a sequence of a series of ‘Sedimentations’ all the same size;
3-     The body’s projection determines the size of the act of painting: a sequence of all four ‘Sedimentations’ formats;
4-     One at a time: one or more ‘Sedimentations’, each of them one of the four sizes, leaning against the wooden base corresponding to a pair of paintings hanging on the wall;
5-     ….
 
The thing I am describing is the wall at the centre of my studio where I observe the painting at the moment I take it out of the ‘Gestureplace’ – or rather the place where it is formed. In a certain sense, I have tried to delineate a white page where I can write my thought, where I can express a concept. I have focussed on the exact moment I detach myself from the act, when I start bringing my visual reasoning into play and creating a distance, putting in front of my eyes what has been established earlier in the close relationship with the substance. This piece of wall is where I am able to see the thoughts that have formed in my brain, either by isolating a painting from the others or by placing it in relation to the others. It is the screen onto which I can project the measurements deriving from my body and as a consequence where I can define my dimension, not only beforehand in terms of defining the painting’s format, the space chosen to paint, but also later in terms of the format where I can imagine what has been painted, in the space that will accommodate it in the world. It is a zone of passage between an interior and an exterior, like a sort of interregnum where I can let the work decant before transferring it to the external world with a finished identity.

This is a symbolic work, the variations indicated here are just a few of them – they could increase ad infinitum. They could for example be determined by the open order of the archive itself or even by the transversal gazes of other people.

(Written in 2020. Modified in 2023)