RUMINATING
THINKING IN FRAGMENTS
Now and then a thought, like some memory to muse upon much later. Later it came but I was unable to give it serious consideration.
(From "Near to the Wild Heart", Clarice Lispector)
“It is even possible that in my work after a few chapters authentically connected between them I can, and must, only write scattered observations. After all, I am a man, and I depend on how things go!”
(From Ludwig Wittgenstein’s diary, 28-2-1937)
"A retrospective look at the journal. (...) I have just read the last book (...) I have been conscious of a certain amount of monotony (...) these pages were not written to be read..."
(From "Amiel’s Journal", Henri-Frédéric Amiel, 3 March 1852)
Over the years, the act of painting there has been accompanied by a reckoning, a rumination, a parallel mumbling.
This chapter contains annotations taken from pages and notebooks in which I have written down the thoughts that come to mind whilst painting since 1980. The first draft begins with the commencement of painting.
It is an organic body, a way of writing that reflects on what I do, on what happens in the concrete relationship with the thing, which tries to understand what I am doing.
In the “rumination” part, the words pour out in a continuous flow and constitute a fragmented discourse. They are not unchangeable words. They do not aim to be an interpretation or even a definitive view.
I started writing back in high school in large A4 notebooks, then exercise books and then gradually in increasingly smaller notebooks before choosing a certain type of pocket-size notepad that I carried with me for years. However, in 2024 I definitively eliminated pen and paper, instead writing directly on a digital device. I always write more easily like this, not just when I am focussing on my thoughts in the studio but also if I want to stop to note something down when I go on my long daily walks in Venice, or my summer bike rides back and forth on the island of Pellestrina, or the few times that I travel here and there, or when I suddenly wake up in the night and reach out to the bedside table in the dark to write on my backlit tablet.
(Written in 2014. Modified in 2024)
