Making sure things happen

 
Staying connected with the deepest inner recess, first you try to touch the substance that we ourselves are made of, but then above all you try to touch the substance the world is made of, that all of us and everything is made of. Nothing is invented. You only need to let things blossom and make headway. I am here only as a go-between to make sure that these things happen. I am the powerless witness of something that happens through me, without any mental control. It is a question of ensuring that the emotive substance is decanted from an inside to an outside through a mechanical action, making the substance take shape as something physical and concrete. Through the ‘Bowl’, which creates the colour, the pulp accumulates and cancels itself out in the ‘Infinite Painting’, it is stratified on the ‘Sedimentations’, it is amalgamated in the ‘Sludge’ and placed one next to the other in the ’Diaries’, making sure to hold onto every fragment and not lose any trace.
Harmonising with the ‘Bowl’ means listening, hearing it speak, being in touch with the nature of things, with a natural and cyclical movement. It means not imposing anything on it, letting it express itself, letting it speak, without enforcing a process dictated by rational thought. This means acknowledging that the ‘Bowl’ – which is an object and not a human subject – has its own interiority and personality. It means letting it exist for what it is, allowing it to express itself with its own language. The colour is formed organically, against the will of the person touching it and the person directing it through the singularity of its language.
In the end, I am the one who ends up thinking like the bowl more than the bowl thinks like me. Or rather, its way of talking merges, is in harmony, coincides, is parallel with my deepest thoughts and less based on reason.
All this leads me to perceive each single element that emerges from this process merely as part of a whole, a whole which goes beyond my microcosm, a whole inhabited by things among things. Animated things and inanimate ones. Human things, animal things, vegetal things, object things…Things produced by humans and things emerging independently of humans that interact and inform each other. And within all of this I keep listening through the tool that allows me to do so: the ‘Bowl’.
 
Essentially, this is the essence of this method, of this daily practice.
Every day when I enter my studio, I perform a certain sequence of gestures.
As soon as I arrive in the morning I put on my work overalls, I head towards the palette to see the colour happen in the ‘Bowl’, a single concave space where I see a single colour form every day.
I never throw out the leftovers from the previous day. The colour that forms always has the previous day’s colour before it is transformed with the addition of another colour. It is the ‘Bowl’ that pushes in one direction rather than another. It is the ‘Bowl’ that dictates the rules, that determines the succession of colours. Sometimes the ‘Bowl’ confirms, it remains on a certain route, at other times it veers off it. For example, if I find myself before a red, I can remain in the range of reds, oranges or pinks or I can shift, for example towards purple with a drop of blue, but I can’t determine green, for example, because getting to greenwould require a series of other passages and other colours. Leaps that come from my mind aren’t possible, but steps determined by the ‘Bowl’, which is in close contact with the most emotive part of my brain, are.
When the substance is ready, I make two or three painterly gestures, spreading the colour on a surface with a brush. I keep a trace of each colour on a wooden stick which I call the ‘Diary’. The ‘Diary’ is covered in the space of about three to four months. There is no waste, no error. Every single passage of the ‘Bowl’ is kept, collected, documented, exhibited and catalogued on this wooden stick.
On the ‘Infinite Painting’ I stratify, cancelling out the previous day’s colour and creating an agglomerate of colours. This painting – which I began more or less at the same time as the diaries – has become a sort of hidden catalogue or annihilated catalogue of all the layers assimilated over time.
The third painterly action I make in the day is on the painting I call ‘Sedimentation’. This layer is not obligatory: the colour is annotated on this surface only on some days. Not all the colours that end up on the ‘Diaries’ and on the ‘Infinite Painting’ are also recorded in the ‘Sedimentations’. Just a few distilled from the ‘Bowl’ remain here. The ‘Sedimentations’ which appear to be monochrome paintings are actually polychrome because they are made up of layers of different colours. On the top edge of the painting, there is around a centimetre in which it is possible to see the process – or rather the story of the painting – before I arrived at the final colour.
 
(Text written in 2022)