In the previous paragraphs I talked about how some techniques and methods used in restoration for the conservation of a work can become tools to invent and provoke new works. I wrote of how a natural event, an accident or neglect can change the state of the work, its corporeality, but not, at least for me, its substance. I tried to communicate how an event, something that happens in reality, is something I accept as a form of manifestation of reality itself, knowing that it can change the object physically, but not its spirituality.
 
In this paragraph I want to hazard a paradox and try to go a step further, affirming that even if the materiality of the work should undergo an act of vandalism, it would be impossible to eliminate it completely. Its aura not only would remain but would even be nourished by an interpretative or creative thought.
If, as I have said, it is the nature of the work that contemplates internally the acceptance of the event, whatever event it might be, it could do nothing more than incorporate even that which contradicts it.
I think that any physical consequence due to a defacement – just like any transformation of meaning through a spoken reasoning, or the taking of a stance regarding the work and as such, bearing a criticism, a judgment – would do nothing more than animate it with a new meaning, recontextualising it, making it exist again with its free nature.
 
Below are three examples in which this happens through the painted gesture – or rather, through the addition of the colour on a painting.
 
THE MOCKERY
Between 2018 and 2019 I painted inside a museum for a few months. At the entrance to GAM in Turin, where the ticket office is, I installed ‘The Substitute’, the double of my studio. A couple of times a month, I went in there and I left a layer of paint on the canvas. Between one trip and another, during my absence, someone from the public entered that space, took the brush soaked in blue and painted flowers on the surface of my green painting. I decided not to eliminate them and I continued as usual, layering it with colour whilst keeping the flowers beneath, considering those new elements as parts that made up its story. Not only did I not perceive this gesture as inappropriate, but I considered it an opportunity to think about this whole issue. 
 
THE PROFANATION
I try to push myself further and get to the place where in some cases I can say that it would actually be better if the work were ignored, repudiated, torn down at some point in its story. If, in another epoch, in a different context, it were misinterpreted or if it ended up representing something that was really far from my intentions, the gesture of the defacement could at a certain point also be there to talk on my behalf.
I am thinking of an act, like the one of the two environmental activists from the Just Stop Oil organisation who in October 2022 threw vegetable soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (at the time valued at €80 million), declaiming: ‘What’s worth more: art or life?’ and ‘Is it worth more than food? More than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?’ They went on to state: ‘Human creativity and brilliance is on show in this gallery, yet our heritage is being destroyed by our Government’s failure to act on the climate and cost of living crisis.’
 
THE OBEISANCE
And what if the gesture were carried out by an artist on the work of another artist (but without her consent)? Couldn’t that become in this case a further imaginative form? Wouldn’t this be a further way of forging ahead and vivifying?
A while ago, to prepare myself for working on one of my ‘Relating’ series (the ‘Sedimentations’ that arise in relation to the palette of another artist) I considered Balestra’s painting of the Madonna that hung over my mother’s bed and was thus in front of my eyes for years. After having painted a series of paintings in relation to the colours I had found on that canvas, which had changed so much over time, I decided to return to the original colours. I had the eighteenth-century painting restored, eliminating the yellowish varnish and adding my own small gesture. In the miniscule points where there were micro-detachments of paint which showed the rough canvas support below, I decided to rectify the problem, adding my red. The same red I then used to start my ‘Sedimentation’. That colour in Balestra’s painting added artificially, as a final thing, became the start of a new painting for me. Almost as if to say that without his painting, mine would not have been possible. Without my appropriating it there would have been no new beginning, or rather no continuation.

(Written in 2022)