THINKING TROUGH PAINTING
PROCEEDING, TRANSFORMING ONESELF, REMAINING IN THE PICTORIAL SPACE
"When I have painted a fine picture I have not given expression to a thought! That is what they say. What fools people are!"
(from Eugène Delacroix’s journal, 8 October 1822)
‘One thing is certain in my life: I began painting only when I started thinking.’
From Toti Scialoja’s ‘Diary’, December 1956
My entire trajectory as an artist is an act of faith in painting, in the possibility humans have of reiterating this gesture infinitely, the possibility of emitting signs, of leaving traces, of expressing ourselves by thinking though images, of representing our own view of things by brushing colours onto surfaces.
It is a sort of awareness that goes continually from a direct relationship with the substance to a reflection on what it activates.
I remain inside the practice of painting, inside of which things slowly change. Basically, this is what painting is for me: a slow and silent mutation that proceeds within a continual and regular evolution.
Since I started painting in 1980 a process has developed. Moving from one point to another, it has led to a gradual transformation of the painting. Untill I arrived from the beginning of the 2000s to a path that has led me to insisting on the same point, marking and keeping the rhythm of the flow of existence.
Nevertheless, the evolution process of the painting always remains open in two different ways.
On the one hand it does so in repetition, through the subtle transformation which only and exclusively happens through the colour that changes daily in the same bowl.
On the other, it does so by passing from one form to another, through different mutations generated by the central nucleus which leads to new derivations every time.
I will talk about this second experience in the chapter “Ramifying”, which comes immediately after this one.
This is followed by the chapter “Leaving one’s own palette” in which I deal with the question of the evolution of colour no longer determined simply by a self-referential movement that is closed in on itself, but also spurred on by external stimuli.
(Written in 2013. Modified in 2019, 2024)
