Me with my friends: Claudio Bartocci, Chiara Bertola, Laura Boella, Gianmario Borio, Enric Bou, Piero Brunello, Simon Callery, David Carrier, Lawrence Carroll, Angiola Churchill, Marzia e Maurizio Corraini, Elisabetta Di Maggio, James Elkins, Giulio Ernesti, Bruna Esposito, Anna Finocchi, Manuela Fraire, Giorgio Galli, Mel Gooding, Francesca Guerrizio e Maurizio Azzali, Oliver Karlin, Vincent Katz, Florence Lynch, Lea Melandri, Alessandro Mendini, Elisa Mendini, Carmengloria Morales, Luca Pes, Cesare Pietroiusti, Elide Pittarello, Lucio Pozzi, Rosella Prezzo, Mariateresa Sartori, Tiziano Scarpa, Corrado Stajano, Marco Tagliafierro, Bianca Tarozzi, Giorgio Verzotti, Angela Vettese.

The book as a place to meet with others.

The second part of the book “One Diary Leads To Another” is composed of a collection of contributions on the theme of diary. I asked people to contribute on themes of the diary, memory, autobiography, the daily traces of a life, in absolute freedom. I created the second part of the research as an exchange between me – an artist – and a series of people: intellectuals, artists, scientists, thinkers, etc. It was as though I had gathered the others in a huge embrace and had asked them to “play” along with me, sharing and accompanying me on this intimate journey, as though I were placing my pictorial work in relation to life. I decided to paint a large work consisting of 40 paintings (each measuring 50 x 60 cm), one for each of the people involved. It is a fragmented diary that took up about ten months of my time. It was a work conceived as a large whole in which the first painting gave birth to a second, the second gave birth to a third, and so on... The entire work was shown in 2010 at the Otto Zoo Gallery in Milan where, during a convivial dinner, the artwork was distributed to friends.

(Written in 2011)