Peripheral vision: "Pellestrinas" and "Lateral Vision".

These two series of works come from two experiences: one positive, the other negative. The first: I bought a house on a small island between Venice Lido and Chioggia called Pellestrina. It is a long strip of land about 11km long that separates the sea from the lagoon. The last part of the island is so narrow that it is just a few metres wide. Here you can climb up and walk on a wall that is about 3 metres high and about 2km long, built as a sea defence for Venice and which separates the lagoon from the sea. When you walk on this line, the "monton", you perceive two enormous spaces out of the corners of your eyes. What you can see is not in front of you, but beside you. They are two completely different areas that almost meet but do not touch. If they met, they would become one and the same thing and thus would degenerate. One is the lagoon and the other is the sea: one has one colour and the other has another. It is in their separateness that they maintain their specificity. The second experience regards my mother’s illness. It is called macular degeneration. Those who suffer from it progressively lose their central vision and all that remains is their lateral vision. You cannot see what is in front of you but you can perceive what is beside you, from the corner of your eye. These paintings convey these two types of awareness of reality that derive from the perception of space through the body’s movement. The strip that is in the upper part of my “Sedimentations” and that maintains a trace of all the layers that make the painting, is turned and the canvas is cut in half. The stratifications of colour, in other words the trace of my painting, occur on two lateral levels. The two parts never meet; they try to get closer but are always separate.

(Written in 2017)

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