The strong impression I had the first time I saw a piece of my painting detached from its surface is what made me write a text-work in 2013 (‘The owner as witness: what I would like to say to the person about to become the holder of one of my works’) is a declaration that has become a statement that I give to the owners of my works. A fact that previously could have been experienced as traumatic has become the stimulus for reconsidering my relationship with the work, with the material it is made of, its transience and temporality, making me accept the detachment and considering it a normal and natural event, which has led me to write a reflection that came about due to the desire for it to be explicated and declared.
The painting is a living organism. The painting is like a membrane or a skin. It is thin, thin and composed of lots of very fine and fragile threads. It can dry, excoriate, become scaly, display swellings and bubbles that can burst and detach. Like skin, it is destined to age. We cannot know how quickly, how much and when it will age. Things have their natural development. Like our human condition, it is at the mercy of factors beyond our control. It is subject to the climate, to air, to movement, to external conditions. It can become something else. It can change. We can decide to try to keep it young for as long as possible, we can nourish it, we can give it facelifts and restorations, but time passes over it nevertheless.I like to think of this time that passes as a continuous creation of the work, or rather a natural continuation of the material’s change. The work that signifies material left as a trace of experience or existence is destined to decompose and transform.
(Written in 2016. Modified in 2021)
