2012
The titles in collaboration with a writer...
Uninterrupted research.
A discourse. "The" discourse.
Every so often I reset to zero… I tidy up. I organise so that I can start over. I start afresh, or rather I continue.
I continue punctiliously.
A linearity of time, a cadenced rhythm like a heartbeat.
Accelerate.
Slowing. Braking. Stopping and then starting again.
Discontinuity. Non-linearity of time. Time that folds in on itself and is remoulded.
Going backwards.
Not much substance comes out, but it forms continuously. Like a drop from a dripping tap that gradually fills a container.
The measure I feel is small. There’s little quantity.
Error, chance, deviation from a route. Changing the meaning of things. Failure.
The discourse about painting is central. The interpretation lies within the painting… I want these works to start from the paint but with different materials placed alongside the paintings.
I am thinking about the exhibition time as ready-made for my works.
My works are like identities that arise and grow within this space and when they are moved outside, they take on a different meaning.
“Farsightedness= the difficulty of focussing on objects, particularly those placed close to the subject, but also those placed at a distance.
With farsightedness, the eye does not focus well at any distance, as though refusing to fix on any level of reality. The fact that generally it is physiologically a little smaller than a normal eye recalls the eye of a child: it almost seems a less developed organ, just as those who have it maintain some childlike traits in their personality. There is an inability to concentrate on an image for long, the compelling need to move on to the next one. Those suffering from farsightedness almost never have a visual distance on which to rest and thus cannot find a life dimension in which they can feel calm, but they are in a continuous state of evasion. Rapid escape from everything seems to be the rule. They are voracious both for images and for life, with the result that they consume all their experiences too quickly and in the end become exhausted.”
(from Riza Psicosomatica magazine: "La psicologia dell'ipemetrope")
The skin of the painting. Peeling off...
With time it can crumple, peel, flake, dry, decompose...
“... is also there in all its stubborn weight and thickness, clinging to the canvas, gathering dust, wrinkling with age.”
(James Elkins in "What Art Is")
Starting from one point and arriving at another.
Walking with my head down.
Moving forward and going back, but never down the same identical street.
Making a cast of the studio. The studio is like the cover of the sedimentation of the colour. I imagine the studio as being able to detach itself from its surfaces and rebuild everything completely from another place.
A concave space that contains.
From the Feldenkrais method:
Attempt a feeling of alternation, a fullness and an emptiness, a movement and a pause, an activity and a non-activity. Intelligent movements are those that lead to a sense of reversibility. Stop occasionally, assimilate and get rid of accumulations.
I have built a space that will fill over time.
Nominate and open. Don’t define and close.
Give titles to works. It has to be something very simple that helps people to recognise what that thing is. Then there can be an open subtitle that is more evocative than explanatory, but which helps people to understand.
Heading towards.
Repeating, reiterating, perpetuating, insisting.
Co-presence. Simultaneousness. Different times simultaneously. The memory gets mixed up. There is no before and after.
Everything is present on the canvas. Nothing is cancelled. There’s no secret.
Twisting the stratifications… turning and turning the painting.
Occasionally during the fluid process there’s a glitch, a clumping, a wall that decelerates… then the wall becomes a barrier and deviates the watercourse. A new rivulet forms. Perhaps it will become a new watercourse? Or maybe it’s only a small deviation?
It’s all there on the canvas.
Unit of measurement: the route from my home to the studio.
352 footsteps from me to me.
Backwards and forwards, always in the same place. Urged to go but turning back on myself. A coiled movement. (See De Kooning’s calligraphic brushstrokes.)
Desire, want, chance, destiny, giving yourself up to the natural process of things, flow, one thing leads to another, urged on by desire, urged on by necessity, laziness, slowness, emotiveness, emotional upset, empathy, thought, distracted concentration, thinking whilst doing, intuitions, associations, striving, introspective, confident, interferences...
Spaces on a human scale.
Mud. The weight of the substance that is deposited in the water.
Venice, the lagoon is like my bowl of colour. Actually, no, it is like the brush cleaner. They both have at the bottom the residue of the substance of the passing of time, the passing of things. Substance accumulates at the bottom.
You always have to feel what you’re looking for.
Fragments that aggregate.
I feel small and concentrated.
The density is more important than the breadth.
The work with stones and Plasticene stratifications.
Geological time, the time of the earth and human time, a lifetime.
Two different materials. Two different times that occupy the same space. The same portion. A past time and a present time that reconnect.
Long gestation times that apparently don’t bring about a change and then suddenly there’s a last-gasp effort, a surge.
The repeated gesture. The daily gesture.
The micro, the macro. Near, far.
I circle around it. Twisting.
It’s like I’ve left my body and were circling around it.
Obsession produces form: dad’s diaries; Opalka. Song Dong, Fernando Oreste Nannetti.
Is it possible that once I have constituted all of this scaffolding, this container of my thought and time, I will throw it all up in the air? And work on the concept of disappearance? Will I go from accumulation to annulment? Make and unmake? Make and destroy?
Don’t keep anything. Chuck everything away. Eliminate any accumulation.
Filling up with substance. Filling. Filling myself. The painting is loaded with substance. It’s weighty.
The substance thickens over time. There is a lot of substance.
The substance collapses, flakes, gives way and comes undone.
The substance ages and breaks.
Simplify, but maintain the complexity.
Doubt.
Reopening, discussing. Volver.
Choosing my own interlocutors.
“Writing serves to develop in parallel.”
(Le Clézio "L’Extase matérielle")
Moving forward and painting blindly, without looking. Without knowing where to go.
“...I leave, but I am not going anywhere – how can I depict this? (...) nothing ever comes (...) On the verge of leaving. But only on that verge. No arrival. (...) whose advance just requires itself, containing its raison d’être, its evolution and its end.”
(Le Clezio " L’Extase matérielle")
Being on the move, glued to reality. Being present, continuing. Remaining within a constant process... I leave and then I re-enter...
More than anything it’s about giving a meaning to that repeated gesture that always seems the same as itself. It’s about being alert, present...
I don’t see, but I feel.
I don’t look, but I touch.
Thinking about normality and not about the extraordinary.
I am amazed about the thing that is happening before my very eyes, a little time, every day. This small quantity forms a certain quantity in time.
It is a thickening of the substance.
A thickness of time.
“The sedentary space is thicker, more solid and thus full, whilst the nomadic space is less dense, more liquid and therefore empty.”
(Francesco Careri in "Walkscapes")
Don’t leave permanent traces.
Stay outside the centre on the margins.
On a human scale: the delimited time of my lifetime, the delimited space of my body. (The studio space?)
I can only do what is on a scale with my body, that is on my scale, my time and my quantity of time; no more, no less.
A portion of space has formed (home-studio route) and my going, my thinking, my doing is established between these two centres...
Staying. Walking inside it.
Thinking while doing, elaborating the thought through the relationship with the substance.
I’m not interested in experimenting. Or rather, I’m not interested in seeing how a substance reacts and improves. I’m interested in letting the substance be and spreading it on a surface. I merely put it there.
I’m not interested in technical know-how, but the understanding of the experience. I don’t want to prevent things from happening.
I’m not interested in the substance as a vehicle for saying something else. I’m interested in the substance for what it is. I don’t want to transform it, not voluntarily.
Being together with the thing and at a certain point something alchemical happens and the substance becomes something...
A substance (a pigment) that transforms into another substance (the painting): from magma to another shapeless magma.
A decanting.
An association: the sludge, the lagoon bed and the bottom of my brush-cleaning pot.
“But it is entirely in the spirit of alchemical and artistic experiment. The alchemists were drawn to slag and refuse: the loved the suspicious skins that thickened over their stews. They rooted in cinders and picked at ashy heaps. They let their waters rot, and then rummaged in the soft granular sludges that sank to the bottom. More often than not it is the crush or the ash that fascinates them, and not the pellucid colours and volatile oils that comprise the stew itself. Putrefaction, with its Latin name putrefactio, is a nearly universal step in the alchemical work. The clean substance has to degenerate into brackish mould before it produces anything work examining.
Academic painting had a natural affinity with mud and excrement, because of the common use of brown hues and thick varnishes that yellowed and darkened with age.”
(James Elkins in "What Painting Is”)
What do I do with these words? What is this gabbling and constant intense working with the word that has followed me for years in parallel to the painting, alongside the work with the substance?
I dilute my colour with lots of turpentine. I need to “thin out” the substance… Seeing as my work consists of substance that sediments over a period time, I need “space”.
There’s a relationship between creating my painting in solitude and meaningful relationships.
My bowl.
A continuous pouring from one container to another. Backwards and forwards, always from the same containers.
One colour reclaims itself every time.
Stale dirty water, which is filled and made of itself.
A fluid that doesn’t cancel itself out or clean itself, which is murky and remains.
It’s always there.
It curls over me.
Balling up.
A centripetal force in the daily ritual. Then, every now and then a tangent line departs that connects with the exterior.
Being witness to an event.
The organic substance comes out of me. It performs here right in front of me.
I create the conditions in which the thing happens.
I don’t talk about myself or my individuality.
I construct. I structure a reality with its own logic and its own system of existence.
A thought moulds itself in the substance.
It’s as though my paintings had absorbed all the water from the lagoon and the canals of Venice. It’s as though the canvases were sponges bathing in the salty water and had absorbed the substance, the colour that the substance of Venice is made of, from the bottom to the top.
Distracted behaviour. Sideways rather than frontally, I move closer with the corner of my eye and indifferently. It’s as though I began from the side, from the edges. Then gradually the thing takes up space and time, it takes its space and its time, and is placed in a more central zone, here right before my eyes.
Acting nonchalantly... indifferently... Proceeding with a wide berth. I let the thing start lightly and in time it proceeds. It starts with attempts. It sometimes broadens and takes shape and sometimes it disappears. Things enter inside without me realising. Sometimes something enters into the visual field that wasn’t there before or at least which I didn’t see before. I recognise it. So I give it space to grow without forcing it.
At other times this part returns to its shady area and then disappears again.
I’m looking for the central theme.
A linear logic...
I tidy up. I categorise. I put things in place. I find the meaning.
With the first works it was initially the physics of the body. Now it’s physics of the mind.
An interior mental space and an objective physical space.
It flows easily.
The infinite painting.
Stratifying the painting. Always keeping it watered like a plant. Keeping it alive.
Putting one layer on top of the other means consolidating. The painting breaks when it is interrupted. I can imagine passing it on... Could someone else after me continue to stratify it?
The thought forms, the substance sediments. It stays closed and takes shape. It stays inside and makes itself known. Then it opens up to others and another substance is created through human relationships.
Always being there, even in the time that doesn’t seem to be mine.
Backwards and forwards. Traversing through colour.
A colour that goes beyond the canvas. A canvas that can also be viewed from behind.
The bowl is always alive and wet, while on the canvas the substance dries and crystalises. In the bowl it always has to transform itself, whereas on the canvas it is fixed in one place.
There is a serial nature within the serial nature to the work of the walls and the paper-diaries.
Don’t endure. Interact.
On the one hand maintain a strong connection with the inside, inside myself, inside my space; on the other an opening up towards the world and relating to others.
The bowl fills, the bowl empties.
If I deny the past, then I also deny the future. If everything is only brought back to the present and there is no perspective it is like denying movement, the possibility of transformation. The present always becomes the past.
And if at some stage this writing to myself opened up towards the outside and I got people to read it?
