Together it is as if they constituted a single unit and the way to make this world perceptible through words.
 
From my early clumsy and inexpert writings of the early 1980s, when I was trying to understand what I was doing, I tried to explain myself to my first interlocutors (my teachers, my school mates, my father, my mother, young artists and old artists that I had started interacting with), right up to the words written when, aware of the unitary nature of the writing project, I began to delineate a route through which – I hope – the meaning of what I do emerges.
 
I have also decided to include the thesis on teaching painting for the academy in the early period because the subject chosen underlines the importance I have always given to the relationship between an older artist and a younger one, as well as ‘Painting as Exile’, the piece I wrote to talk in public about my work for the first time as part of a conference at the department of philology at the University of Parma.
 
In the selection I made, there is a temporal gap between the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s, not only because I didn’t write much in that period but also because I think that everything I brought up through my writing in that period was just a pedantic effort that wasn’t very clear and not at all significant.
The writing that is closer to me is the spontaneous one that has always unfolded in ‘Ruminating’ and the analytical albeit simultaneously naïve one aimed at communicating with others, which only arose later when I started working on developing the archive.
 
Many of the budding thoughts that can be rediscovered in ‘Ruminating’ occasionally bloom into actual independent texts, whereas in other circumstances the opposite happens: they start under the form of reflective drafts in ‘Self-portrait’ and are condensed into a separate text only afterwards.
 
The awareness of the importance of artists’ writing as a form of self-affirmation and self-understanding about their practice started immediately after I began painting and it is what led me – right from the start – to collect books written by artists (among one of the first was the collection of Matisse’s writings and Pontormo’s diary).
 
Essentially, wasn’t it precisely the fact that I wanted to hear artists’ talking about what they were doing that gave me the will to keep up the weekly artist sessions (in which each week one artist would talk to the others about what they were working on) in Venice?
 
 
To consult the writings, go to ‘Archive works’ and select Type ‘Text’ and Series ‘Artist’s writings’.
 
 
(Written in 2024)