QUERINI STAMPALIA FOUNDATION

CONDENSING THE COLOUR

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. 

 

DILATING THE COLOUR 

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.

The thing that had allowed me to realise the idea, the element I focused on in order to extract the colours to steer the original idea into reality (1), was the small diary of brushstrokes where I recorded all the colours while I was developing the painting. 

I started from the “clump”, from the flower, which took on symbolic value as the condensed point of the artist’s thought, asking myself how to expand this intimate and dense gesture. How to extend it into the space? How to think of a broad gesture? How to express such a small gesture on a large and public scale? How to go from intimacy to exteriority? How to give shape to the small and concentrated colour formed on a daily basis in my studio? 

I imagined the painting expanding, opening, that the colour was distributed in the space. I envisaged a dilatation of the painting in the architecture as if every single layer were peeling off three-dimensionally in the space. Through a prevalence of green and blues, and hefty dose of red, the painting multiplied into lots of separate paintings. 

I perceived the architecture, I felt Mario Botta’s space, as the place where my colour had the chance to establish itself, to settle and to take up its own space.

Every single colour is the expression of an uncontrolled emotiveness and needs to be kept, compressed, embraced and accommodated.

Between them, the two grey and horizontal levels – the ceiling and the floor – hold all the coloured surfaces. Between them are the colours painted on the vertical walls, divided, sectioned and separated from each other by lines, black iron frames which create the borders.

And so what happened was that the architect’s voice superimposed the artist’s: Finite places. Building “finite” spaces to investigate and discover “infinite” conditions! This is the natural working condition in which the architect works. The idea of place (which is always a UNICUM) presupposes the existence of a limit which is created in a finished space... (2)

 

FROM THE CANVAS AS SUPPORT TO THE CANVAS AS SUBSTANCE-COLOUR 

Sometimes it is necessary to escape one’s repetition and try to shatter one’s rhythm by intersecting with the process of someone or something else. What sets the work in motion is when I feel in harmony; when I find similarities and equivalences rather than differences. Starting from contact points, junctures can arise from an adherence with another experience. When my internal system converges with an external system which has similarities with what I do, a short circuit is created and something is activated that becomes a common ground where subjects can recognise each other.

The meeting with the textile company Bonotto and seeing the Fondazione Querini’s textile collection in 2016 were the two things I related to empathetically.

Doretta Davanzo Poli writes in her publication about the Querini textiles: Looking at the Querini soft furnishings, it is possible to discern (…) an important suggestion, which should be considered as one of the many contributions attempted to solve the (…) problem regarding the conservation or substitution of the soft furnishings in the historic abode. Of the solutions attempted thus far, the most common have been: the restoration of the fabric and its mummification on the walls in the state in which it was found (…) or the replacement of the fabric with a similar one (…). A brave solution (…) projected in the future for the interest capable of being aroused in whoever remains (…), could be that of continuing to do, at least in this context, that which was done for centuries, which is to substitute the old ruined fabrics with new ones. (…) In this way, as well as handing down textile examples of some interest to the history of textile art (…), the original Querini “collection” would endure in worthy fashion. (3)

My response to the request was to add a new “layer” to the Querini collection and at the same time add a new “layer” to the Bonotto textile collection.

I imagined translating the pictorial gesture (spreading oil paint on a canvas) into Bonotto’s practice (of creating fabric with weft and warp) and this is how I translated every single layer of colour on a coloured canvas: from the canvas as the support of the painting, to the canvas itself as the substance-colour.

Just as every single brushstroke of colour consists of numerous gradations, so the fabric I developed with Bonotto is composed of numerous different threads which together create a single colour. From afar they look like large monochrome canvases, but when we get closer we realise that the colour is made up of various nuances. This is an extension of the pictorial gesture, without mediation, without distance, which forces us to a closer and more direct relationship with the colour. We also perceive that each canvas has a back and a front. The back is always red. As in my paintings, the first layer is always red. I always start with red. Each colour is superimposed starting with red. Over time, it is possible that the fabric will show wear and tear in some parts and will then reveal this hidden part of the work.

Then if we take a step back from a close-up view of the material to have a broader vision, we notice that the maximum width of the pieces is about 160 cm. This is determined both by the specificity of the loom the fabric is woven on and also by the largest size of all my paintings. It is more or less the height of a human being and the maximum arm span. 

 

RECOMPOSING EVERYTHING WITH A GLANCE 

In the end, we realise that the work is actually a diptych, composed of two parts: a painting in the museum and a work in the café. The work is complete when we go up to the second floor and return to the painting in the nineteenth-century room in the museum. The circle is closed, the project is actuated as soon as we recompose the backward process in time through our perception. The imagination returns to where things are born.


CONSIDERATIONS – APPEARING DISAPPEARING

When I started thinking about this project, about a work for that space, I thought that my task was also to keep all the thoughts, history, pathways and requirements of the various people and institutions involved, together: the artist (me), the curator (Chiara Bertola), the architect (Mario Botta), the museum (the Querini, with all of its history and its collection), the textile manufacturer (Bonotto) and above all the public, the people who would be experiencing that space in the future – from the students who study in the library to the museum visitors.

When Chiara Bertola asked me to come up with a project specifically for that space, my immediate reaction was to say no, which is what I normally do when I am asked to do new unknown things. I was scared of the idea of dilating my artistic, intimate gesture that is carried out in my studio every day, marked by a rhythm of existence that is normally hidden, small and concentrated. I did not like the idea of betraying it by taking it out on a wider, oversized scale, in a public place characterised by the fact that the people who experience it, pass through it with a distracted gaze. They use it let’s say absent-mindedly without ‘contemplating’ the art, in a place where they spend time in a light-hearted and carefree way.

After saying no, which is what I always need to do to free up some thinking space, I took a little time before coming up with an idea. It was an idea that, whilst maintaining some fixed points of my way of thinking, was outside my normal practice and took into consideration everything connected to that context, thus opening myself up to new linguistic possibilities.  

What had initially seemed like a limitation, an obstacle, instead became a cardinal point that gave me the chance to move the work onto a different level.

Everything that at first seemed to cancel the most profound meaning of what I do and which did not make appear what I am usually used to seeing come out of myself, what would not reveal what I am usually used to seeing come out of myself, instead turned out to be the impulse to make it reappear but under a new and different light.

Leaving the framed space of the museum, in other words the contextualised space set aside for art, forced me to step over the threshold and imagine a gaze that was no longer frontal but transversal and ultimately to take things a bit more lightly.

 

Essentially for me this is what determines the success of a work: that it first appears to a discerning look and then disappears to an undiscerning one.

There is a difference between the public’s gaze in a museum, gallery or institution dedicated to art, where the work is declared as such and is guaranteed because it is defended from external distractions, and when the gaze is in an open, undefined context that is not dedicated to art. In that case, we have to provide a meaning to what we are seeing. 

And I had to contend with this second gaze, with the casualness of a distracted, deconcentrated gaze that wanted to give a lighter and more open interpretation. Basically, going beyond limits and outside the frame has allowed the gesture to be immersed in reality.

 

Finally, I would like to say that at the end of the day this work became the exact of opposite of what I had promised myself at the beginning. 

 

1, 2: Mario Botta Quasi un Diario. Frammenti intorno all’architettura, Le Lettere, Firenze 2003 e Mario Botta Quasi un diario. 2003-2013, Le Lettere, Florence 2014. 

3: Doretta Davanzo Poli Tessuti inventario, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 1987

(Written in 2017)