EXPANDING / SHRINKING

 

Moving Closer / Moving Away

 
‘I am in Venice and am spending blessed hours looking. Everything is a bit smaller in reality, for my eyes accustomed to the excesses of America.’

(from Paolo Milano’s diary, Venice, 7 July 1947)

 
‘P. has become an enormous, extremely soft means of transport; lying down, stretched out upon her vast white belly, clinging joyously to her immense tits that rise up like round hills in front of me (…). I love being up here! “

(from Federico Fellini’s ‘The Book of Dreams’, 22 September 1963)

 
MOVING CLOSER / MOVING AWAY
I don’t know if you have ever seen a painter at work, the movements they make, how they move back and forth in the space, standing before the surface of the painting, moving closer to it, then moving away and then moving closer again. I don’t know if you have ever seen how their eyes behave while they look, opening them wide to concentrate and to get as close as possible to a well-defined place on the surface they are working on and scrunching them up to distance their gaze from what they are seeing. At the moment of moving away, the distance is gradually extended until the gaze starts to take into consideration everything there in the external world, relating what is outside to what lies inside the painting.
It is a constant attempt to focus on a precise place on the canvas, at first from very close up and then immediately afterwards focussing on the same place in relation to the painting as a whole from a more distant position, alternating these two focalisations ad infinitum.
Two moments coexist in the painter’s vision: on the one hand there is the close-up, intimate one, in which she is so inside the substance, so attached to the surface, that she experiences the act as the maximum adhesion to the moment, to her personal choice, that she cannot see anything else beyond the colour. On the other hand, there is the moment when she moves away, which determines a view of the whole and which is when she has a detached understanding of her gesture, becoming aware of what she has done. Part of the painter’s process lies not only in the moment she touches the canvas with the paint-soaked brush, but also when she distances herself from what she is doing, understanding, to then move closer in contact with the painting again.
This coming and going of the gaze, the pulsating of the vision, is a bit like the heart muscle and the palpitation of the heartbeat or the lung muscle that contracts and dilates in the act of breathing. It is a coming and going of the body and the gaze, a constant oscillation, an uninterrupted movement of the mind.
It is in this constant, infinite rhythmic scanning between a contraction and a relaxation that forms the thought and action of painting.
 
Sometimes in the daily relationship with the bowl, I have the perception that it is so small, I imagine it as the world which I can hold entirely in my hands; at others, however, it becomes so big that I can’t see its outline anymore and I feel immersed, at one with the colour. I alternate rhythmically between moments in which I feel inside it, in the fluid substance, and the material cause prevails; whereas there are other times when I feel outside it and see it as an object, which is when the aware gaze prevails.
As with the bowl, this question of moving closer and moving away has become increasingly evident in the ‘Sedimentations’. These paintings have become the fulcrum of my painting and contain within their nature this visual and mental thought-action that concerns both myself as the person who creates them and the viewer who is looking at them. The coexistence between the monochromatic part that almost entirely covers the surface of the painting and the multicoloured part at the top, which is just a detail of the whole, constantly push towards a dual action of seeing: on the one hand, a broader vision of the whole and on the other an attention for the detail. The detail that holds within it the history of the painting, and tells you where to look, obliging you to look more closely and which cannot necessarily separate itself from the totality. On the other hand, the incumbent, hypnotic part, with the prevalence of a single colour, leads to a broader vision. However, we are aware that it is only in the coexistence of the two parts and in the necessary dual perception that it is possible to have the cumulative experience, the general idea of the painting.
 
 
EXPANDING / SHRINKING
This particular movement of the gaze, which corresponds to a movement of the brain, is precisely what has structured my way of thinking and is what has dictated the continued and vital relationship with painting, producing works made of stratifications of colour over time.
This pulsating of the eye in striving to put into focus, alternatively at first from close up and then from a distance, the world that is formed here, in front of me, is also the one that has led me to see these concretisations of coloured substance as independent singularities, as objective facts of reality and to place myself toward them as an independent body, on the one hand catapulting myself inside of them, feeling I am an integral part and on the other pulling myself out, creating some distance.
Other types of works have appeared as a result of this continuous movement of watching that recall pre-existing works that have become emblematic representations of this uninterrupted fluctuation, emphatic reflexes of the painter’s movement. A series of micro-sized things and other macro-sized things have appeared, works that put us the viewers in a peculiar concrete condition in that we feel either miniscule or enormous compared to the form we have before us.
When the image increases in size, growing disproportionately, we are no longer able to keep our distance because we are so attached to the substance that we are unable to see its borders and have a perception of the work as a whole. For example, after having extracted a miniscule piece from the ‘Infinite Painting’ and having taken a photo under the microscope, I created a gigantic photographic print, the ‘Coring’, which covers a whole space. This created such an exaggerated situation that it made it impossible for those of us observing it to understand whether what was surrounding us was something finished or whether it was the fragment of something so much infinitely larger that it went beyond our field of vision. The substance exploded in the space and became so enlarged that it produced an abnormal mass, forcing anyone who found themselves inside it to believe themselves to be a constitutive element of the substance.
On the other hand, when the forms are reduced and have become exaggeratedly smaller, there is the perception of keeping them in check right before one’s eyes, as in the ‘Shrunk Self-portrait’ in which the entire ruminating through millions of words about my work published on the site ‘Maria Morganti: An Archive of Time’ is compacted onto a single page and cannot be read without the use of a magnifying glass because it is not perceptible to the naked eye. Or what happens in the ‘Shrunk Gestureplace’ where the ‘Gestureplace’, or rather the physical space that I walk through every day with my body to carry out the painterly action, is transformed into such a minimal miniature that it is no longer the place that contains me but is an object I can hold in my hand. Anyone looking at this miniaturisation perceives themselves so totally outside of it that they become aware of being able to hold it both in a physical-material sense and in a mental-conceptual one, and therefore of being able to possess it entirely.

(Written in 2020)