The ‘Stand-in’ is a sort of itinerant micro-studio. In some cases, it becomes part of the ‘Substitute’, which is the other work that considers and develops the question of the studio space more broadly.
It is a work in progress that is a filiation of the ‘Infinite Painting’. Its job is to stand in for it so that I can continue to procrastinate the painterly gesture when I am far from my studio space or when the ‘Infinite Painting’ has to leave the studio, for example for an exhibition.
When the work is resting it hides the painting, but it allows a glimpse of the bowl in a transparent corner of the toolbox. However, when it is active, the painting is revealed, transforming itself, and the bowl leaves the box to end up at the centre of the table in readiness for generating colour.
 
I started this work between the autumn of 2018 and the beginning of summer 2019, while I was involved in the ‘Substitute’ project at GAM in Turin. Elena Volpato had invited me to think about a way of bringing the work in development inside the museum – in the museum entrance, in the hall where the ticket office is. On that occasion, the ‘Substitute’ was activated before the ‘Stand-in’ had been conceived as an individual work, when it was still merely a allusion and an integral part of a wider work. That initial rudimentary form consisting of a wooden panel with the painting, a ‘Bowl’ and a ‘Diary was then donated to the museum. In that context the table that the museum had made available to me for placing my work tools on was at the centre of the space. That table, which had been part of a performance that Hermann Nitsch had done years earlier, was then given to me when the ‘Substitute’ left GAM.
 
The first time I implemented the ‘Stand-in’ was in July 2019, in the Chiesa della Propositura, in Pratovecchio, when I was asked by Pietro Gaglianò and Paolo Fabiani to work on a special project that consisted of painting one colour on my canvas every day for a week inside the church while musicians played a piano alongside me.
On that occasion the work consisted of the box, which acted both as a container and as a resting base, and a panel with the painting. The table was not present.
 
It was only later, in the peace and isolation of my studio that I developed and perfected the entire apparatus, so that there the table and the toolbox were added to the part present at the exhibition-performance in Pratovecchio.
The current definition came about when I decided to integrate the entire structure to be used for preparing the colours with the painting part. In order to do this, I first had to distort Nitsch’s table to adapt it to the measurements of the box that contained the doubling of the ‘Infinite Painting’ and to add a wooden draw designed specially to contain all my tools of the trade. Then, to make it more mobile, I also decided to add wheels to it.

 
(Written in 2022)