In order to create the ‘Shrunken Gestureplace’, the work that is a shrunken version of the original ‘Gestureplace’, the space constructed to contain and make the act of painting happen, I decided to delegate all of the painting work to two young artists, Marta Magini and Melania Fusco, who offered me some of their time, working alongside me and accompanying me during a period in my work.
I asked Marta and Melania, who I trusted completely, to enter into my method for a few months, trying to adapt their rhythm to my way of painting.
I did not want to perform the act of painting myself, because I felt it would have been forced, something distorted that would have altered the meaning of my artistic gesture that contains both a certain physical dimension linked to the body and a certain temporal dimension linked to daily life.
Marta and Melania worked alone on the ground floor of my studio while I continued with my reasonings on the first floor. Every now and then I would go downstairs and see the small, condensed painting quickly grow through their presence in a relatively short space of time. It was as if I had become a spectator of myself, not only through the symbolic distance from the space through the shrinking of the space-object, but also through the creating of the painted substance in their hands. It was as if the fact of knowing that the beat of someone else could superimpose itself on mine, it helped me on the one hand to relativise what I do and on the other to feel part of a broader whole that other people can participate in.

(Written in 2021)