In the “Self-portrait” section there is a chapter called “Marking the territory” which opens with an image made by my uncle, Alessandro Mendini.
When I started planning this site, I asked him in a letter if he would be willing to interpret my space, my world. He replied with a drawing.
“These drawings are extremely important to me” he was saying “they express my intimate relationship with the worls and things (…) My relationship with the world is more mental than physical. Of the world I am intersted more in psychic than physical relationships. This is why I find it quicker to tune into the psychology of a person than I do to appreciate a seascape.”
Here is my letter to Uncle Sandro
Venice, 15 July 2013
I dreamt about my brother-in-law A. M., who designed a little house for me out of a canvas measuring one metre by two. Using tie beams and ribs I used it everywhere. It was not a tent, but a real house with all the mod cons and even a garden. When I no longer lived there, I put it on and it became a suit. All this happened against a background of pallid landscapes of tenuous and autumnal colours.
(From Piero Morganti’s "Diary", Verona 22 August 1987)
Dear Uncle Sandro,
I’m writing because I’d like to involve you in something for my site. One of the chapters is going to be called “The Workplace”. It starts with Venice and how this city relates to my work. (Paradoxically, it is as if the lagoon, its system of waterways, all of Venice, were like the bowl where I do my daily work and my paintings were like sheets absorbing the dirty water, the coloured water of the canals, from the bottom to the top. The sludge on the canal beds is an accumulated substance like that which remains at the bottom of my brush holder.)
The chapter is about the space where things happen, where the work is contemplated and created. It will talk about my studio, but also my route from home to the studio, about the canal bank next to it and about Pellestrina.
By place I mean a mental condition rather than a physical one; an interior but also an exterior; a distant exterior and a close one. My space is a sort of ecosystem that supports itself. There is a solitary aspect: when I am inside, I am in and the exterior stays outside – the exterior is there and I am here. But there is also an adjacent aspect that concerns contact with others, closeness, proximity with something else that the nucleus feeds on.
I remember the great speech you made for me a few months ago at my conference at the Triennale: "The colours that Maria expresses... and her intimate obsession with shutting herself inside the little building in Venice that is her studio, which is practically a house, where she constantly mixes a sort of colour broth in these bowls that is continually changing." I was wondering if starting from here, from your vision of my house-studio and of the bowl, if you would like to interpret my place with a drawing.
Lots of love,
Maria
Transcription of Uncle Sandro contribution at Triennale, Milan
I have always experienced this system of things during my lifetime in a very emotional way and therefore I see things from another point of view. Of course, as Francesca Pasini said, Piero Morganti’s diaries and Maria’s paintings are extremely existential things: they are continuous movements connected to the autobiography. They are autobiographies. They are extremely close autobiographies when they become actual diaries. It is like a sort of calligraphic existence, in words for Piero and in colours for Maria. This need, this ability, this obsessive continuity of keeping a diary is something that has always intrigued me. I have tried it and I did it maybe eight, ten or thirty times between great gaps of time and space using different techniques especially in some articles for the magazines Casabella, Modo and also Domus. I always thought I should keep going, that I should continue, that I had to do it every morning. I didn’t. However, those small pieces in which I described my day or in which I described a certain sensation on a certain day, for example, these things were really intense for me.
I think that the colours that Maria expresses are a way of making herself safe. They are defined by this intimate obsessivity of hers, of her shutting herself inside her small building in Venice which is her studio (almost a little house in a square) where she constantly mixes in these bowls a sort of broth of colour which continues to change. My way of working and also of conceiving colours is dispersive, full of escapes, transits, major chaos. I never know how to choose a colour alone; the final decision is always given to others. Maria, on the other hand, has this methodical sequence of a person who inside this small building has created security, even buying pieces of wood to guarantee another seventy or 110 years. How many pieces of wood have you bought? A lot, I hope! I would need far fewer.
Then there is her reliance on monochromes. A painting is a monochrome. Furthermore, that small enigma, that gift that is given by a strip that allows you to see that that one there is different from that other one…It is a strange situation that I greatly admire.
(Written in 2015. Modified in 2018, 2021)
