...Maria also keeps a diary, but she splits it up into various little booklets that she always carries around with her in a bag that looks like a suitcase. One for transcribing dreams, one for her thoughts on art, one for the recording of facts. She’s sick, but with my same malaise.
From the Diary of Piero Morganti, Milan, 14 November 1991
My father’s diaries have been in my hands since 8 March 1995, the day he died. Without any clear-minded premeditation, little by little, over the years, they have become an integral part of my life, to the point of determining the course of my work in a fluid and natural manner. It was in the moment I became aware of the fact that the diary-esque sense of my proceeding had emerged in my work so loud and clear that I brought the thirty-eight notebooks into my world more purposefully. Evidently, I must have sensed the importance of having inherited such a powerful gesture such as that of keeping track of one’s own existence through the methodical act of writing, to the point of finding myself unwittingly perpetuating this foolhardy undertaking by writing a number of diaries myself in my own language: that of colours rather than words.
A sense of responsibility coupled with the desire to keep track and take care of a life that preceded my own were the sentiments that led me to renew it, developing the discourse, transforming it only to then imagine that I might place it in someone else’s hands in the future.
A HOME FOR MY FATHER’S DIARIES
I dreamt about my brother-in-law, A. M., who had designed a little house for me with a piece of fabric, one metre by two. Through the use of rods and little beams, and I would use it everywhere. It wasn’t a tent, but a proper house complete with bathroom and even a garden. When I stopped living in it, I would put it on and it would become a costume. All this took place against a background of pale landscapes with soft, autumnal hues.
From the Diary of Piero Morganti, Verona 22 August 1987
After having read them all and publishing a selection of them in 2010 in the book Un diario tira l’altro (published by Corraini Edizioni), the thirty-eight notebooks full of my father’s writing remained at my side, sitting on the desk in my studio until I began to long to build a house that might contain them all. I thought about a place where they might be conserved, welcomed and embraced. Almost as if it were a dwelling for my father’s own sentimentality.
In designing this space, I bore two things in mind. The first was the description, in the diary, of a dream my father had in which he talks about a little house, tailor-made for him by my uncle, and which, like a costume, could be carried around. In response to this image of his, I represented a sort of box-suitcase which could be taken anywhere thanks to the handle it had on the top. The suitcase has an inner lining with a fabric-work (1) that protects the diaries, and the outer part is protected by a casing, (2) just as a piece of clothing covers and shelters a naked body.
The second thing I took into consideration was the three structures on which my universe is based: the Sedimentary, the Diarytheque and the Infinite Painting. These are the three ‘archivers’ that contain all the painting material that is produced in the studio on a daily basis, and which together sum up the entire sense of what I do.
I focused in particular on the Infinite Painting, looking at it as if it were a human figure. From there I started out coming up with a representation of the heart, of the essence of a father, through a container with a vaguely anthropomorphic shape to it. I thus doubled the Infinite Painting by putting the two individual elements next to each other, almost as if they were two people holding hands with one another. As part of the framework, I then brought this new feature into my cosmology, physically placing the trace of my existential time alongside that of my father. Inserting his life straight into my own world is like inserting the body of my work into a historical perspective, as if to reflect a long temporality, much longer than that of a particular lifespan. The time gathered within my work is just a little portion of another much broader one. There’s a before and an after. I’m not the only one: there was someone else before me, or rather, before, alongside and after my existence there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions… of others, each with their own originality. And that’s why we, other human beings, have the task of preserving their unrepeatable singularity.
•The fabric produced by the Bonotto Company of Bassano del Grappa is a remnant from a project that I carried out for the Mario Botta cafeteria at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice.
•The image printed on a cotton fabric (the same as the one I use for my oil paintings) is a blown-up reproduction of the coring for the diagnostic analysis carried out under a microscope of the Infinite Painting performed by the CSG Palladio in 2014. In its role as a covering for A home for my father’s diaries, I see it as if it were one form of intimacy that envelops another.
(Written in 2018)
