MUSEUM OF CASTELVECCHIO IN VERONA

 

"The unit of measurement is colour"

This exhibition was conceived in relation to the architectural spaces at the Castelvecchio Museum, Carlo Scarpa’s contribution and the museum collection.

This is the first art space I was introduced to and visited as a child.

Often Scarpa makes us look at something by approaching it from behind: he shows us the back as if it were the front. He shows us what we do not normally see.

In response to the architect’s approach, I thought of the exhibition as a crossing, a duration, a journey, a walk in the space that every now and then would open up in the relationship between my works and those of the museum.

Disseminating. Indicating. Insinuating myself slowly, slowly, in the spaces that the museum houses, in the parts that the museum leaves free. Often placing myself behind things in the empty spaces.

I get close to the works, listening, inserting myself in the voids, in the pauses, in the interstices, in the fissures, in the backs of the works, behind and on the margins.

Spreading, accumulating and disseminating.

The sedimentation, the experience that produces substance, the work accumulated over time in the studio is spread around the museum and takes its position.

 

1- OVERTURNED WALL BENEATH SAINT CECILIA’S GAZE

On the ground floor, in the sculpture gallery at the entrance to the museum we find ourselves behind “Saint Cecilia”. Seen from behind she appears to be looking down and ahead.

I imagined filling the space that she appears to be indicating to us with my work.

Scarpa’s base doubles. A toppled pink wall, painted inside the room, absorbing the colours around it, on which a mosaic of Paper-Diaries and Paper-Glass is composed.

The idea of variation, of repetition that is never identical, of the individual that is a unique piece, that is already “a whole” and that produces another feeling every time it is put in relation to another whole, gets close to the theme of the module in Carlo Scarpa. The module of the square that Scarpa used in the “Sacello” just outside the “Saint Cecilia” room and the square of the gold mosaics that I used in my work is the one that Scarpa used, for example in the insertions in the cement of the walls in the Fondazione Querini garden in Venice, even if mine is a square broken by my gesture and is never the same twice.

 

2- IMPRINT (VENICE 1998-2010). DIALOGUE WITH ALTICHIERO’S CARTOONS

The paper that protected the table I worked at for twelve years when creating my pieces of paper with oil pastels.

This work is placed in the room Carlo Scarpa furnished with Altichiero’s cartoons and fresco of Saint Fermo in Verona. 

A fragment of cartoon is temporarily substituted with my “Imprint”.

The cartoons are stratifications of preparatory drawings for the final image of the fresco, a cartoon is the underlying drawing – in other words the one nobody sees. They are made visible thanks to the technique of tearing, which refers to the stratified story of creating the work.

My “Imprint” is what lies behind the work: that which we cannot see, that which remains, the leftover, the accumulation of the substance around making the painting. It is the stratification of time, of the experience; it is the trace, the imprint, the sedimentation of twelve years of “doing”. The place of proceeding and reasoning through colour has been transformed into a palette-shroud.

The contact has generated the trace, “the contact of an absence”, according to Didi-Huberman’s definition (La somiglianza per contatto, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2009)

My imprint appears to have become the place in which all the colours, including those of all the paintings in the museum, were formed.

 

3- PAINTINGS FOR THE QUERINI AT CASTELVECCHIO

From the Querini to Castelvecchio.

The paintings conceived inside the space at the Fondazione Querini in Venice in 2008 spring from the relationship with the Querini collection and are now thrust inside the Castelvecchio picture gallery in the 14th-century painting rooms. What does this slipping and relocation provoke: disorientation or getting one’s bearings? 

Leaning inside the Scarpian baseboard just as I place my newly-finished canvases in my studio to look at them, under a series of three paintings that proliferate with the same reds that my paintings consist of. The reds bounce from one canvas to another.

Leaning on the floor, the five canvases recreate a band of horizontal painting like the green one in the adjacent room, which reproduces a curtain with a fresco. From that room there is a viewpoint from which it is possible to see them all together.

 

4- BEHIND THE MADONNA DEL ROSETO

One of my paintings on the back of “La Madonna del Roseto”.

The back that Scarpa proposes as the front forces us to go behind the work in order to see it.

To see Stefano di Giovanni’s work we are forced to go behind mine and vice versa to see mine we are forced to go behind Stefano di Giovanni’s. The back becomes the front and the front becomes the back.

The “Madonna del Roseto” painting: golds and warm reds. My painting: purple muddied with silver. Two different ways of thinking about metals.

My painting is hung on a panel that is the same size as the “Madonna del Roseto” frame. This back, this panel of wood I painted in red becomes the first layer of my pictorial stratification. As always in my painting, the first layer is red. It is as though I were painting the first layer last. A starting over again?

At the same time it is also what Scarpa does in the hanging of many paintings, in that he gives them a coloured background.

 

5- WITHIN THE FRAME (RED, YELLOW, PINK, GREEN)

Two neighbouring frames designed by Carlo Scarpa to hold Domenico Morone’s frescoes from Villa di San Pietro in Cariano. 

In one, Morone’s fresco “Saints Roche, Anthony of Padua, Onuphrius and Saint Lucy”; in the other my fragment of wallpaper inspired by the same fresco and substituting the one temporarily absent from the museum whilst being restored.

Here the frame frames a piece of wall: the wall of paint taken from a piece of architecture elsewhere and the wall made up of my pieces of paper.

My work takes inspiration from the structure divided into four parts depicting the four figures of the saints, reprising and reinterpreting the colours of the figures’ bodies: red, yellow, pink and green.

I conceived the fresco as part of a painting that continues outside the framed space, imagining a rhythm that continues infinitely.

I insert myself in one of the two empty frames, using my Paper Diaries as fragments of colour, as mosaic tiles to paint on the wall.

The work took on the form of the diptych. My painting on the right converses with Morone’s painting on the left.

 

6- IN THE INTERSTICES (BEHIND LIBERALE DA VERONA’S ALTARPIECE)

I used my fragments of “Sections” of the Plasticine “Surfaces” to insert myself into a new substance.

Behind one of the museum’s paintings, in the support structure of Giambono’s painting that Scarpa left visible and which consists of rough wooden sticks, I infiltrated myself in the interstices, in the fissures between the pieces of wood, not imposing myself frontally, not altering it, but insinuating myself with small fragments of painting. It is as if the colour from the front were pushing towards the back and escaping.

 

7- WITH THE BEHEADED MADONNA 

At a certain point in the past someone cut the head off this painting. Carlo Scarpa imagined giving it back the space that was taken from it. 

I went inside that space. I infiltrated myself into that emptiness with my “Lateral Vision” in a dialogue between my painting and Andrea da Murano’s.

 

8- DIALOGUE WITH GIROLAMO DEI LIBRI: MADONNA DELL'OMBRELLO AND THE PRESEPIO DEI CONIGLI

I asked the museum if they still had any unused Carlo Scarpa easels in storage. They found me two.

I imagined them as transparent walls. This allowed me to place myself with my Sedimentations opposite the painting on the wall, creating a visual stratification between the painting of Girolamo and mine.

The eye tries to focus between them, between what is in front and what is behind, looking for a relationship between the two parts. My colour seemed to become the enlargement of one of the colours of the Girolamo painting.

Placed back to back, one like the back of the other, the two easels force us to look at one painting at a time.

(Written in 2020. Modified in 2017)