Picture 1. Jacopo Palma il Giovane Room.

 

First layer: brown. To be seen in all the pictures. Perhaps an overall patina that has homologised all colours over time. It is what links and joins together. What has been blocked by the passage of time. What time itself has levelled out. A generalised colour. A basic colour. Deep. From darkness to light.

 

Second layer: cold white. The draperies. From the darkness of the first to points of light.

 

Third layer: grey, white, yellowish, i.e. a warm grey. The collar of the self-portrait of Palma il Giovane. Underlining the whites.

 

I become aware that I am looking for colour on the canvas and not in the cup… I tend to mix up a colour in the cup, but then I decide not to use it for the Querini work. But I want to keep it all the same and so I spread it on another canvas. One of the canvases, one of the various paintings on which I am working in the studio. So it is as though the paintings I am working on simultaneously for the Querini  will be contaminated by all these experiences. These paintings will be contaminated by that. These paintings will consist of colours that I will have considered “errors”, colours that are “not right” for the Querini picture. All the experience that has led me to that particular colour will, all the same, be kept and spread on other canvases… Doing, proceeding towards another path, towards a colour that makes me meet others by accident…

 

Fourth layer: (dark) purplish red tending to rose. From the man turning his back in Palma il Giovane’s Ecce Homo. A day dark with rain. The windows in the room are ajar, half closed. There is very low artificial lighting. Perhaps it is for this reason that what immediately is impressed on my sight is a bright red.

 

The relativity of a colour… A colour is a thing but can also become something completely different. Feeling? A rational choice? Not the reproduction of a colour. It is not like when you select a colour as an aesthetic choice, choosing a colour in relation to another colour in agreement, in harmony.

What does choosing a colour mean? How to choose? To go towards a colour, lead yourself towards a colour.

For the purplish red I have used magenta slightly tinged with the white from the earlier layer (the paintbrush dipped in turpentine still had a little of the preceding colour). This red has become lighter, brighter, because it is rather transparent, having been painted over the earlier white which, at the same time, also had some green beneath it. It is completely different.

 

Fifth layer: violet red. Of the garment. I continue with this though taking it from another point of view. I tend to violet.

 

Tend towards… Go towards… Towards a certain colour… By searching I find… but I do not know what I am searching for… I find it… the colour finds me…

To fill. Colour. Lay on. Apply. Add. Understand. Choose. Layer. Go. Give a colour. Expand…

While I read a book by Batchelor. The usual polemic: drawing – colour. Contain colour within lines? Colour – feminine; lines – masculine. Blanc: “… painting is the art of expressing all the soul’s concepts…”. Barthes: “If I were a painter I would only paint colour”.

I “find” the colour, I do not “make” it. I do not invent it, I do not plan it, I do not produce it, I do not reproduce it… What am I doing with the Querini work? I indicate a colour. I do not reproduce it. I tend towards it. It is not created colour, it is not a product. It is not an ability but fortuitousness. To indicate. Choose.

In the fifth layer. The colour is alive. It is not a veneer. It is lit from within. I go back to my red period. I am the red. An interior light. Within the painting. Within the colour. An autonomous colour. The colour has its own life. It self-illuminates. It is an independent colour. A colour that speaks for itself. Colour has meaning in itself. Colour speaks alone. It effectively exists for what it is. Each colour is a unique, singular and independent thing.

Each thing has its own time… Temporality. That colour is like that at that given moment, but it then might become something else. Colour is not a concept. It does not derive from an idea. It is a natural phenomenon. That’s all.

What does understanding a colour mean?

The loss of words, of understanding… in the making, the self-making of colour… Colour is a physical aspect not a thought, it undertakes itself. Then, after it has “made itself”, after it begins to exist, I can begin to understand it… I cannot think or plan it. It is a momentary loss of reason.

I lose myself and then find myself again in colour. Sometimes, when I begin to paint with certain colours, slowly I find myself surrounding myself with those colours. They begin to take part in my daily life. In the things that surround and envelop me…

John Cage: “… verbal language is unable to define the experience of colour…”.

The specificity of colour. The colour that can only be that particular colour and no other. The autonomy and absoluteness of colour. Silence. The power and autonomy of colour. To speak of the inexpressible…

I speak through colours. Colours as language. I speak of their self-making. Making in order to make. What comes from a process that lets itself go with the open and free flow… It begins along a path or, no, rather like the flow of water that moves in an undetermined manner. It begins without knowing where it is going… Then I stop and discover. And I build the river banks.

The diary, in other words the strip of paper that I call a diary, is thoughts about colours. Just like a wall of paper that continues inexorably through time. It shows all the colours, all the “thoughts” (i.e. colours), that have passed through my mind and that have “come about” in my studio in a certain period of time. Thoughts about colours, experience through layering, an itinerary. Not a narrative but the testimony of time passed in the studio. My subjective time. But the colours are autonomous from me… I do not determine them. They come about.

What is the yardstick for choosing colours? It is arbitrary. It could be one thing in a certain moment, but it could also be something else…

What is the system for choosing colours? For this project for the Querini foundation I am working in a way I have never tried before. I refer to and am supported by something outside myself. I use a colour palette that stands aside from me.

The inadequacy of words for expressing or describing a colour. When we try to explain a colour to someone we are obliged to give examples or show samples of colour, or else we refer to conventional codes such as a Pantone range of colours.

How can we make ourselves understood? How can we speak about colour? In this painting sequence it is as though I were constructing my own colour samples…. In an itinerary, a journey that leads me to something I actually do not know. It is in this way that I work in the Fallani silkscreen workshop. Not towards a “colour”, a “correct” colour, but by using all the aspects of my own experience…

What defines a finished painting? And then the finishing of a painting too is arbitrary. It is finished just for that particular moment: but it can be or become something else at any moment. It can be continued again at any moment even after a long time or it can be worked on forever.

In fact it is as though I had been painting just one single painting for the whole of my life: one consisting of many possible layers, but that every so often I interrupt and continue on another canvas… What would happen if I were to paint my whole life on a single canvas? Probably the canvas would collapse under the “weight”. In a corner of my studio I actually am undertaking this experiment. (And, with regard to this, I have already been adding layers for a year without leaving a single trace of each passage, and I hope to continue infinitely.)

It is as though I were spreading and diluting the colour, and that the work were becoming a “discourse” with a horizontal development, like writing that has to be read while it is still being written… Speaking through colour, showing colour. In a continuum. Many colours are “colour”, “painting”, but to show this I have to subdivide it. The arbitrariness of language and of definitions changes according to how we wish to think and see.

Vocabulary. Definition.

Fortuitous yet also contingent colours. “Chance events of colour” (David Batchelor).

I never use “pure” colours straight from the tube. I use industrial, repeatable paint as a basis. Then I “dirty” it, but not with the aim of creating another well-defined colour. I decide on it with a certain degree of randomness. At the most I might try to tend towards something, but not to arrive at something which I don’t know what it is to be… Impure colours.

Apply colour. To spread it.

At a certain point in its history a picture itself will decide it is finished. A colour emerges. For a moment it seems clear  to me. A colour surprises me. A colour with  life of its own. It does not necessarily, in fact hardly ever, correspond to what I expected. It surprises me, rather, because I find something that I did not know at the beginning and that only revealed itself at the end. Something that was completely obscure at the start and that, when I find it, I begin to search further for, I dig into its depths, I reassert it, I know it and keep hunting it through a series of pictures.

In this specific work for the Querini I tend towards a colour, but it is not a planned colour.

 

Sixth layer: light blue. The window near the Portrait of R. Querini by Marco Vecellio. The window high up to the left.

 

Seventh layer: the mantle of the Madonna in the Deposition by Palma il Giovane, blue sugar paper, a mix of blue and green. A hybrid colour. Leaden. There comes to mind the Deposition in Viterbo by Sebastiano del Piombo. An unhealthy colour.

 

Eighth layer: rose, violet-rose, a rose deriving from magenta. The knee seen in Palma il Giovane’s San Nicola di Bari dota le fanciulle.

 

A “palette of colour” has been created. Created from an “idea” about colours. They are not a representation resulting from observation, but a “pretext” that sparks off the process. Colours chosen, not with my head, but instinctively.

There is an initial idea of colour determined by observing the colours of the paintings in these particular rooms, one that then becomes something else during the work process. There is no planning in the search for the colours, but there is an idea of rose, the idea of pink… I take magenta red and Titanium white and I mix it with another magenta rose by another firm, and then add turquoise…

The picture is complete when it has arrived at its “due time”. Time is necessary. There is the need for necessary time. The right time is needed. Colours slowly come in.

 

Ninth layer: rose. Rose once more from the same painting. Violet rose tinged with black. An unhealthy rose from the flesh of the cheeks. Pale. Grey.

 

Everything is tinged and contaminated. The paintings I work on simultaneously in the studio absorb my experience of the Querini foundation…

While I “search”, “go towards”, try to reach, I lose myself. I lose my aim, but I find something. I find by chance things that rise up to meet me. They come between me and what I am searching for. So the point is not in finding, not in a subject to be found: the search itself is the sense. It is by going ahead that I find and discover, it is by this that things crop up, and colours I wasn’t looking for emerge… And I capture them. They remain. Everything in the accumulation remains: in the underlying layers and in the pictures I am working on at the same time.

Making in order to make. One layer after another. One thing wipes out another; a thing, a colour becomes something else, another colour.

A work made out of time, which at the end cannot be seen. It might be the final layer, a last colour that cancels everything out.

This experience of working for the Querini has sparked off a process, a different way of working. It moves, it goes ahead. The work, the painting for the Querini, becomes a pretext for channelling my interest and allows me to find something new. A new colour.

 

Tenth layer: magenta again, 21 September 2006.

 

Eleventh layer: magenta again, faintly tinged with white. But mixed in the same cup as usual. So it still contains coloured material from earlier on; the preceding colour is developed…

 

Perhaps today, 25 September, it is finished? Chiara has come to my studio and talked with me about Empathy. She too is reading the book by Laura Boella.

To listen to the other. To enter into the other. To enter into the other, into colour, and allow it to exist just as it is. I do not direct colour. I do not construct it. I do not plan it. I do not think what it will be. I listen to it and watch it come about. I see it come to birth on the canvas.

 

Picture 2. The Room of Tables.

 

I concentrate first on Bellini. The Madonna and Child, and the Child’s golden-yellow garment … and the gold of the tables and then, again, the drapery by Palma il Giovane and the drapery of Schiavone. Three degrees of yellow: yellow-ochre, ochre, orange-yellow.

How strange to see in my studio that the “basic” picture, that of the Querini project, the one hanging at the centre of the large wall, influences all the other canvases on which I am working simultaneously. The whole series of paintings derives its temperament from that picture. It would be great if this sensation I am feeling were to be conveyed to others too…

I pick up a camera. I place it in a corner of the studio where I can seen the greatest number of canvases… I begin to photograph with a certain rhythm from that viewpoint and then we’ll see if this system works… perhaps it might form the material for a book…

 

First layer: orange-yellow. The drapery in the Sacra Conversazione by Palma il Vecchio.

 

Second layer: a lighter yellow. The golden-yellow garments of the Child in the Madonna and Child. I go towards something I do not know: yellow. I still cannot find it. I cannot discover the colour of the garments… but while I go forward… I stumble on something else… and decide to keep it… to add it to the other layers…

 

Third layer: I try the same yellow again, but with a touch of orange-yellow and some white. I become aware that it is the same colour Carlo Scarpa used to paint my living room…

 

Fourth layer: emerald green. Have I found what I am looking for? Why this green, for example, and not another colour? And then: I become aware that while I was “making”, the next step had already been taken… Something was leading me to the successive step… successive, the successive colour…so I aim, I aim for… without knowing precisely what, without planning a particular colour…

 

Fifth layer: golden-ochre yellow. That reminds me of the gold of the tables… The warm orange-yellow of the drapery in the Sacra Conversazione by Palma il Vecchio, similar to the ochre of Schiavone.

 

Sixth layer: light yellow. The shawls of the king of the Magi in the picture by Francesco Rizzo da Santacroce. It is not the reproduction of a colour and, probably, not even the memory of a colour but, perhaps, the idea of a colour that I now have here in the studio after the time I spend every day gathering colour in the room I am working in.

 

 Seventh layer: blue tinged with green. The cloak of the Madonna della Sacra Conversazione by Palma il Vecchio.

 

In between – between one layer and another, coming to know a new colour and to recognise it, allowing it to settle in order then to remerge – there are times that must be respected… in between other colours pass over other canvases. Between one layer of the Querini painting and another are other colours that need to emerge, to exist, to be drawn out… This is why there are lengthy periods of time: I do not apply more than one layer of colour  day.

 

Eighth layer: light rose-red. Which is always part of the magenta range… The gown of the Madonna con Santa Caterina, San Francesco, San G. Battista e San Nicola.

 

Ninth layer: dark red. The drapery of Judith and Holofernes by Catena.

 

Tenth layer: carmine red. The Magi. Francesco Rizzo da Santacroce.

 

Eleventh layer: vermilion red. The Sacra Conversazione by Palma il Vecchio.

 

Twelfth layer: I keep pushing onwards; a slightly lighter colour.

 

Thirteenth layer: again a lighter colour.

 

Fourteenth layer: … and again, I still push on… always keeping the same colour in mind… which is never the same…

 

Slowly I am getting there… What does it mean to work with a colour? To be inspired, to accept it, stay with it, go towards it, listen to it…? Certainly it does not mean reproduction, repetition and, perhaps, not even evocation. But, rather, departing from that point and moving towards another. Leaving from and going towards?

 

Picture 3. The Longhi Room

 

Here is a monographic and more homogeneous room. Longhi. I start searching for a red to start from. As is my habit… my usual pretext… I do not start from a white page, I start from myself: red. I carry within myself the memory of what I know. I begin.

 

First layer: gilded vermilion red. The jacket of the hunting bowman. From La Caccia dell’anitra in laguna.

 

Second layer: the clothes of the greyish powder-pink little girl in La Famiglia Sagredo.

 

Third layer: I reuse the idea of rose, but I tint it with black to make it greyish.

 

Fourth layer: water green. The sky and the lagoon that merge in La Caccia allo smergo. One reflects the other. A monochrome separated by a slender horizontal line and darkened by sepia coloured earth. Blue tinged with transparent yellow.

 

Fifth layer: sky blue. I am still reaching for the water and the sky.

 

Sixth layer: dark sugar paper. The trousers of the dancer in La Furlana which are also the colour of the dressing gown of the man in La Famiglia Michiel. Dark.

 

Seventh layer: the bodice of La Furlana, light sugar paper.

 

Eighth layer: sage green. The dressing gown of the woman to the right in La Famiglia Sagredo.

 

Ninth layer: olive green. The curtains and upholstery in La Famiglia Sagredo.

 

Tenth layer: light blue. Light. Tending to grey. Almost white. The woman showing the map of the world in La lezione di geografia.

 

Eleventh layer: the jumper of the rower in La caccia all’anitra in laguna. It is a brick red, an earth colour… I search for the earth… I look for a prop…

 

Today, 19 July 2007, I am in the studio and I am looking at the two pictures painted so far for this project. I become aware that they are both red and that this latest one too is also tending to red… I start from red and return to red. I have a sudden longing. That the last two pictures I have still to paint, and that these last layers for the Longhi room, might end up, become and take on the form of red… that they might shift and reach out to red… And so when I enter the Longhi room in the Querini in search of my next colours, and keeping this longing in mind, I begin to look around and move my eyes from one red to another… And by red I also mean rose, orange or any kind of red, pink etc. I begin with red. Red is always my origin, my principle, the basis of my painting. By now it has become the way in which I prime and prepare the canvas… but this time I will even finish with red. I go back to the starting point, but in another way after having followed another journey.

 

Twelfth layer: the upholstery in La Famiglia Michiel. I aim for red. Pinkish red, tending to orange…. I am in the museum. I have just left “my room”, and I go towards the lifts. I walk with my head lowered, looking down to the floor. I look at the part of the floor restored by Mario Botta. Here it is rose Verona marble. The same colour I saw today in the upholstery in the painting by Longhi! And there comes to mind all of my childhood which was suffused by this rose marble, by the whole of Verona.

 

Thirteenth layer: the belt of the woman in La Famiglia Michiel. Coral – rose – orange. It rings out!

 

Fourteenth layer: always the same colour. I look for it. It did not work in the earlier layer… Now this layer is pinker, more flesh red. Let’s see what happens when it dries…

 

Picture 4. The Portrait Room.

 

First layer: I search, search for… a red to begin with. I have not painted for a couple of months and to start again from what I already know gives me a sense of security and the possibility of going ahead without “thought”. So I allow my mind and senses to flow out in search of a red… I am in the portrait room. I do not think. I allow my eyes to shift quickly and to stop instinctively; they must discover and enter… Like an open window. There! The garment in the Ritratto del Procuratore Giordano by Sebastiano Bombelli. Dark carmine red, light carmine red… I’ll put a little Lacca di garanza on it…

 

What I write about each colour in this diary is always written before I mix a colour and apply it to the canvas. The words are born in the Querini foundation itself or else just after the trip from the foundation to my studio. On the other hand, the record of what the colour “becomes” is in my diary of colour notations. Brushstrokes of colour that I paint on a piece of paper after having applied it to the canvas.

 

Second layer: burnt Terra di Siena. The lining of the torn sleeve that bares the shoulder of the philosopher in Filosofo (già creduto Leucippo) by Luca Giordano.

 

Third layer: greenish pale blue. Contrasting with the violet in order to create the moiré effect of the sleeve in the Ritratto di Polo Querini Stampalia by Sebastiano Bombelli.

 

Fourth layer: plum/eggplant violet. The other moiré colour of the sleeve in the Ritratto di Polo Querini Stampalia… one thing leads to another… one colour leads to another… without being pre-planned, in a flow.

 

Fifth layer: the flesh colour of the Filosofo (già creduto Leucippo) by Luca Giordano. The cheeks and the shoulder. A pale but clear flesh colour tending to greyish rose.

 

Sixth layer: his flesh again, but this time that of his livid cheeks.

 

Seventh layer: the white page in the two portraits of philosophers by Luca Giordano.

 

Eighth layer: the transparent veil covering the skin of the lady depicted by Giuliano Forabosco. Transparency over the flesh.

 

Ninth layer: vermilion red. The red ribbon tying the necklace in the Ritratto di Gentildonna by Forabosco.

 

Tenth layer: dark Lacca di garanza red, tinged with a little white and carmine. The mantle in the Ritratto di Polo Querini Stampalia by Sebastiano Bombelli.

 

Eleventh layer: purple velvet. A dark velvety magenta. The clothing in Ritratto di Magistrato by Sebastiano Bombelli.

 

I am nearing the end of this painting. It comes to mind that I should take out again the painting for the Palma il Giovane room. I have the idea that, with the way the fourth painting is going, it might be similar to the first one… it is as though the red I am now tending to might be related to that painting while, at the same time, needing to be different… so it is necessary to look at the first again, to take it up once more to check their individual particularities. I look at the picture again. I take down the other one and hang the first on the wall. In it I tend more towards violet. I give greater emphasis to the violet part. Magenta – violet. So I have added a twelfth layer to number 1. I do not fix on a colour in the room. I refer, rather, to the humour of the room itself. And I continue to move between the Palma room and that of the portraits. Back and forth. I return to painting number 4. I put it back on the wall.

 

Twelfth layer: I return to a hint of red. A soft velvety red. Lacca di garanza + Permanent Rose + Quinachrome.

 

Thirteenth layer: another veil of the same colour as before.

 

Fourteenth layer: and again.

 

Fifteenth layer: and yet again.

 

Picture 5. Jappelli room

 

First layer: painting by Antonio Storm. La partenza del Bucintoro. Pink. Old rose. Flesh pink. The rose of the Palazzo Ducale. Salmon pink. Warm pink. There comes to mind the rose of the seas in the Fenice theatre. In the painting: the flags hanging from the balconies, from the masts of the ships, the general light diffused over the buildings. Slightly copper, a little orange, a little sun-warmed…

 

Second layer: Il Guado, La caccia al cervo, and La Tempesta by Pietro Tempesta. Three paintings. Moss green scattered here and there throughout the three paintings.

 

Third layer: La Partenza del Bucintoro by Antonio Storm. Blue, a greenish sky.

 

Fourth layer: Battaglia by Matteo Storm. White, white – grey, white – transparent silver, airy, vague, atmospheric, not flat. The hindquarters of the horses in the foreground, clouds of smoke produced by the shooting, the walls with their turrets, the dogs and the reflections on the armour.

 

Fifth layer: Battaglia by Matteo Storm. Blue and dark blue. The plumes on the hats of the three trumpeters in the foreground.

 

I take in hand once again picture number four for the Longhi room. I apply a fifteenth layer and return to rose and orange. To the rose of the upholstery, of the belt… I go back and forth between one painting and another in a continuous movement. These five paintings become more and more united. The colours shift from one to another and the coloured “thoughts” shift organically. The five paintings merge. They become like a single work. I go back to painting number five for the Jappelli room.

 

Sixth layer: here I am. I recapture this room. The blue of the light greyish sky that is to be found in the three paintings by Muller and the Battle paintings by Storm.

 

Seventh layer: Il Guado by Pietro Tempesta. Violet tending to the very light red of the blouse of the woman with a child on the carriage.

 

I go back to picture number three. The sixteenth layer: once again with Longhi… and once again I return to that flesh red, but I warm it up even more…

 

Picture 5, eighth layer: Antonio Storm, La Partenza del Bucintoro. The red of the figure at the lower right. Its cloak in shadow. Dark carmine red, Quinachrome.

 

Ninth layer: vermilion red and then it will become carmine… A darker and a lighter Lacca di garanza… In many places: in Storm’s Battaglia, the soldiers’ jackets, the horses’ saddles; in the three pictures by Tempesta, the shirts, the jackets, the trousers, a hat; in Antonio Storm’s La Partenza del Bucintoro, parts of the gondolas, the hats, the clothing, the cloaks, the skirts; in Matteo Storm’s Accampamento militare, flags, jackets, trousers. A constellation of reds that surrounds me throughout the room. So many tiny points, so many small stars… an archipelago of reds.

 

Tenth layer: there are still reds scattered here and there. This time a darker red.

 

Eleventh layer: red again. But today I add a little carmine to the cup…

 

Twelfth layer: red again. I start with what is left in the cup and I add some light cadmium red.

 

I speak through colour. My words are colour. I allow words to flow freely… and then I observe and listen… allow yourself the pleasure of listening. In this I feel myself close to the work being done by Meri. We are walking along two parallel paths.

(Written in 2007)