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Two neighbouring frames designed by Carlo Scarpa to hold Domenico Morone’s frescoes from Villa di San Pietro in Cariano. In one, Morone’s fresco “Saints Roche, Anthony of Padua, Onuphrius and Saint Lucy”; in the other my fragment of wallpaper inspired by the same fresco and substituting the one temporarily absent from the museum whilst being restored. Here the frame frames a piece of wall: the wall of paint taken from a piece of architecture elsewhere and the wall made up of my pieces of paper. My work takes inspiration from the structure divided into four parts depicting the four figures of the saints, reprising and reinterpreting the colours of the figures’ bodies: red, yellow, pink and green. I conceived the fresco as part of a painting that continues outside the framed space, imagining a rhythm that continues infinitely. I insert myself in one of the two empty frames, using my Paper Diaries as fragments of colour, as mosaic tiles to paint on the wall. The work took on the form of the diptych. My painting on the right converses with Morone’s painting on the left.
"In one of the “palaces” she has taken over a frame left empty after a fresco by Morone had been removed for restoration. The work has taken the place of another as though, for the time being it, it inhabits the space and the house. Once again it has become an “intruder” in search of a dialogue with another language. Within that empty space the artist has created a wall of papers whose colours are related to the “missing” fresco. “It is as though I were painting from life with my ‘mosaic’ elements. As though with my coloured module I have created a new painting.” In other words, she is looking for a new relationship between extraneous languages, between materials and times that at first seem to be at the antipodes and which, instead, turn out to be neighbours and capable of working together: the hues of the pigments of the Renaissance fresco and a contemporary work which emerges from these layers of colour. Here too Maria felt herself in harmony with the fragmentary fresco: “I am also interested in working in this piece of frame in order to highlight the wall that has always been there. The frame reveals only a part of a far longer wall...”. From the very start, she has always thought that a picture must be something that goes beyond the limits of the frame; so she paints the same picture fragmented into many “pieces” that continue to reproduce themselves... and in fact even the structure of the Morone fresco is a fragment of something larger that has been lost."
Chiara Bertola, in «L’unità di misura è il colore» (Silvana Editoriale, 2010)
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