The work is made by:

“Sedimentary”: steel and wooden structure containing canvases and oil on canvas paintings. “Diary-theque”: steel structure containing oil on wood paintings. “Infinite Painting”: steel and wooden structure containing an oil on canvas painting. “Diary Imprint”: oil on wood painting. Table with “Bowl Imprint”: wood and marble. “Dad’s Diary House”: steel, wood and fabric structure containing handwritten notebooks. “Floor”: Mapelastic elastic concrete. “Sedimentation”: oils on canvas.  “Bowl”: ceramic and oil colours.

 

This work is where the founding act of all my work happens. It is here, inside, that the meaning of my process, my way of thinking, my poetics, is compressed. The subtitle summarises this: “Delimiting one’s own space through the body. Reiterating the gesture. Generating the substance-colour. Leaving traces. Archiving the time of existence.”

The title is an invented word which contains two words: Place and Gesture. What I mean to say by it is: the place where the action can be performed, where it can procrastinate and constantly change. The gesture is that of painting, or rather the possibility that humans have of continuing to exist through the manifestation of an act. It is a precise, almost mechanical, abstract act, emptied of any narration. It starts over every day from the same point, but the original act is not annulled or cancelled out and instead the work carries within it the entire memory of everything that preceded it. It is about creating the conditions that permit the thing to happen, so that it can be manifested infinitely. It very gradually pinpoints a system of working that with desire, good will and being methodical can lead to experiencing this gesture – this rite – repeatedly every day.

Essentially, this is the process: every day I head towards it and add a colour. I never use a pure colour, but always start with what I find inside the bowl, dirtying it with something else. The colour is renewed daily, the substance transforms, is consumed and never accumulates. As soon as it is ready, I spread this colour on my surfaces: the “Diary”, the “Infinite Painting”, the “Sedimentation”. The “Diary” erases nothing and retains everything. It collects all the colours generated inside the “Bowl”. They are the ones which maintain a trace of all life, whereas the “Infinite Painting” is the opposite. It is a continuous cancellation, which does not dissolve substance but instead intensifies it, condenses it and creates depth. Everything remains accumulated and stratified behind it. Then there is the “Sedimentation”, which unlike the other two does not contain every colour that has come out of the bowl. It selects what to keep and what to eliminate, almost as if it were a distillation of the palette. 

When the passage of existence has left traces of its passing, all of the substance-colour that has formed is conserved inside the containers, which are “Archivers” of emotivity. 

The “Sedimentary” is a depository where all of the “Sedimentations” are stored in my studio. In a way it becomes a measuring device: one that measures quantity. The capacity of the container determines the substance that time forms little by little. The “Sedimentary” is in a continual state of transformation, like a warehouse which is always being emptied and refilled. It helps me to find the right measure. 

The "Infinite Painting", which I have been painting continuously since 2006, began to stratify on a wall in a dark corner of the studio.

After a few years when the canvas began to thicken and widen, and have a certain weight, it was necessary to move it in order to continue working on it, to preserve it and perhaps take it out of the studio.

So it was placed in a container, the “Infinite painting theque”, which acts as a wall, as protection and as a transport container.

Once finished, the "Diaries" are kept in the “Diarytheque”. This object becomes a sort of folder, an archive of my time that contains the painted Diaries up to the present and those that I still have to paint. I thought about all the time that I have left to live and I have accumulated a quantity of wood that corresponds to that amount of time. 

At first, the painted part is small and the untouched part is big. Over the years this object gradually fills with colour.

It’s as though I have built a space that I will fill with my life. The meaning is not of death, of the end, of closure, but of a physical and temporal space where the normal flow of things is allowed to flow through colour.

The work also consists of the “Imprints”: the “Diary Imprint”, the “Sedimentation Imprint” (the back of “Sedimentary”) and the “Floor”. They demonstrate the point of contact between the paintings and the space where they originated, thus marking very clearly the passage from the body, which has left a sign through its movement. 

Essentially, what happened is that a studio gradually formed inside the studio. It is as though the gesture of painting had condensed and compressed, circumscribed in a small portion of the studio. This space within a space gradually became smaller and more compact to the point that I even considered moving it out of the studio. Perhaps we can say that the studio – or rather this precise portion of space – has also became an “Archivist”.

Sooner or later I would like to exhibit the “Gestureplace” in a completely out-of-scale space, like a hangar or a cathedral: a monumental space. Through the relationship between the two exaggeratedly differently sized spaces a friction or short circuit would probably be created that would make the inherent sense of time in this work emerge. The time of life, the longest a human being can have experiences, is in itself extremely brief compared to the time of the world, and therefore what would happen is that the spatial dimension would be there in order to represent the temporal dimension.

During 2020 the “Gestureplace” has been transformed and is now complete with pedestals that raise it approximately 40-45 cm from the ground. A platform raises the elastic concrete floor and four other trollies support the Infinite Painting, the Diary-theque, the Sedimentary and the Dad’s Diary Home. The empty space at the centre is where I move around to paint and the four archivers that surround it, demarcate it and contain it, all stand on supports. It is almost as though this elevation were there to highlight and confirm a precise space – the field of action. It is as if it defined a small stage for a private daily action that is detached from the rest of the world.

(Written in 2019. Modified in 2021)