PICTURE GALLERY FONDAZIONE QUERINI STAMPALIA

 

Venice, 2 August 2006

Dear Chiara,

Here’s how the Querini project is beginning to take shape in my head: five overdoors starting from the Jappelli Room and finishing at the Palma il Vecchio Room. The dimensions of the canvases will be the same as the existing paintings that will be temporarily replaced by my paintings for the duration of the exhibition.

I see five paintings all hanging on the same side so that they create unity. There is a very interesting point of view from the final room: if you kneel down a little and look towards the first room, you can see all of the five points together. It is interesting because the line is fluid, serpentine and they don’t overlap each other.

The idea is to relate them to the colours of the paintings from the Querini’s collection rather than with the architecture, the decorations, the furnishings or with what you can see outside the windows, but with the paint of the paintings in each individual room.

I will work on one painting at a time. Every day, or at least regularly, I will go to the museum and stay in one of the rooms for a while, before taking a colour back to my studio. I am not trying to reproduce it, but filter it through my mind and my memory, renewing it through my experience.

And so I will start layering with my usual gesture. There will probably be around twenty layers per painting.

At the same time I will keep a sort of written diary in which I will note down where and from which paintings I got my colours.

It will be as though the room I am concentrating on will become a large palette. It will be strange, because it is the first time that I draw on something outside myself. We’ll see what comes out of it.

I think that it could be an interesting phase for my progress and I am grateful for this opportunity that you have given me. I am sure that it will lead to a shift in my work.

I don’t think there’s any precise due date, which is what I like, so we can take all the time we need to construct the work well.

Love

Maria

(Written in 2006)