“What’s crucial in one’s life and work is to become something different from what one was at the beginning.” (M. Foucault)

 In reality I do not paint images or figures. I do not have a descriptive nature. I am the pure passage through which they emerge in their original wholeness. I am only filter and threshold of their appearing; window of their looking out. This is why ‘my images and ‘my’ figures keep that monumental and almost ghostly quality of things unnamed. Their meaning lies exactly in that, they are not figures of something but figures of themselves. Figures of the act of producing figures, of that event that brings the undiversified things of the world inside the language, making them, for the first time, visible in the name and in the figure. I, thus, think of ‘my’ painting as a course of initiation and wisdom, not a pedagogical one but an unbroken exploration on how  the image is created by itself, through us, subtracting itself from the undiversified universe. This is why I don’t own and never will be able to own the object of ‘my own’ figures. I may spy, perhaps, with the corner of my eye their fast passage into the visible. In this original gesture of letting the figure appear there’s a painful innocence, practically inexistent nowadays, which I sometimes see only in the art of a few Italian primitive artists and in mosaics. To the vertigo of this endless beginning I consecrate the entire life of my seeing: inside and outside painting. (Milan, September 26th, 2007).

I have no pictorial “technique” or “techniques”, only erotic liturgies, strict rules and well tested and always updated rituals. (October 24th, 2007)

I want to become more and more a structural, mineral, medieval painter. (October 24th, 2007)

The paradox is not just my modus operandi, my poetics but the fundamental status of the image itself. (December 15th, 2006)

The image is the modality itself of human nature to relate to the world. (August 29th, 2006)

“The act, even if repeated, is always virgin.” (R. Char) My images, too, despite their serial obsession and endless variation.

I feel like a parallel man. As if watching the world with the corner of my eye. In that constant perception of having missed something fundamental I live in complete nostalgia. And “my” painting has only two main themes: the threshold and the farewell. Nothing else. (March 4th, 2007)

I hear no voice. Words don’t come out. I only hear a rustle, as if something, non-stop, non-cease, would wear out by rustling. Something getting thinner and thinner. But I don’t know where or why. (March 3rd, 2007)

A car passes by. A boy playing by himself turns around to watch it. What made him do that? What is the nature of that curiosity that made him turn and which already contains its own answer? In that gesture of the head there is not just mere instinctive curiosity but also all of his tale. (March 2nd. 2007)

I tripped on a-three-step staircase. A foolish thing! Yet, getting up, I had a hard time recomposing my body in its harmonic wholeness, in its bearing, its experience. That small accident had somehow taken me to pieces. In these days I feel like I’ve been held together with a string of rope. (March 2nd, 2007)

“I have created a crystal world for myself, so that from anywhere I looked, I would fatally realize that it was not natural.” (Ungaretti). Me, too.
“I’m tired of yelling with no voice.” (Ungaretti) Me, too.

Today I saw the ‘world’ put on unusual proportions. Huge clouds entangle, like torn rags, around steep and unconcerned peaks. Men and “world’ live together separately. And this is the reason of our everlasting nostalgia. The real ‘world’ cannot be lived by men, who can only live their own universe of signs, built and made available to make the horror of their estrangement, their condition of exiles and their cosmic loneliness tolerable. The men’s ‘world’ is the poisoned fruit of their own imagination, of their own language, of their own dream and faith. Then, moving in this spider-web of signs, they freakily deceive themselves by thinking of being the lords and masters of the other “world’. But they’re never one, not even of their own fragile and pathetic canvas. (July 3rd, 2006)

“The ritual sign is not a representative sign”. (Baudrillard). All my signs are ritual and ritual is also my modus operandi. This is why my figures represent nothing else but their own appearing.

 “… it is about casting a radical doubt on the principle of reality”. (Baudrillard) ‘My’ painting expresses and give shape entirely and substantially to this “radical doubt”.

If seduction exists in ‘my’ painting, this is due to its absolutely artificial nature, since by quoting Baudrillard: “Seduction never belongs to the sphere of nature but to that of fiction. It never belongs to the sphere of energy but to that of the sign and the ritual.” In such strict, almost liturgical and normative ritual, all my pictorial action takes place. The image produced, the result of such ritual, that is the work of art  remains invisible until the end of the liturgy which implies, in order to be seen,  its complete detachment from me. This is why the figures I produce keep a sort of unwillingness and despite their scrupulous planning they always appear unexpected and unknown. (August 6th, 2005)

PAINTING

Painting is the conscious exercise, through its specific instruments, of the visual relationship between man and world. Its ensemble (body, brain, eyes, hand, brush or else able to lay paint and whatsoever support involved), codified right from the origin, has never really substantially changed although gone through several metamorphosis. This is why, painting, which is a complex, articulated and perfectly organized and regulated language, is inscribed among the fundamental acts of our civilization and culture. No predominant fashion or trend, in no epochal overturns, with the obvious exception of a real end of the world, can, unless led by a complete intellectual bad faith and extraordinary theoretical lowness, declare that painting is obsolete or dead, inasmuch as painting has always proven to be consubstantial to men in order to understand the meaning of their destiny, as much as their own breath. Any image that painting produces (either abstract or figurative or conceptual – words which I use in their cultural conformity, or better, in their cultural conformism) is a founding image since it invents and creates the original shape of the visual relationship of the painter with the world and thus the world itself.The painter never really sees until the work is finished. So, neither definite nor final shapes of things or objects exist, stereotypical shapes that a “good” painter should prove to be able to reproduce (thinking, in short, of such exercise as a simple skill, creating that dangerous virtuosity so often connected to the idea of painting) as any realism, in its own naivety, would pretend; but open and unique shapes, created and filtered by the peculiar sensibility of each painter, all different and all founding, proof of the relationship between eye and object, which is the only real issue of any painting.Therefore painting is essentially creation and proof. Painting, in proving it, creates the world and makes it visible to itself and the others. Any true painting, although respectful of history and the tradition of images, is a creation of a world ex-novo. The tree painted by Carrà is not the same painted by Morandi, or the one by Giotto (to whom he is fundamentally related and connected) or that of Piero della Francesca. This mysterious object that our civilization has called tree, finds in each artist its peculiar interpretation, its invention, its vision.Therefore painting is, when authentic and original, always a founding-hermeneutic exercise, which rewrites the forms of the world, giving life to an endless hermeneutic spiral.This is the movement of cultural growth roused from and nourished by painting. Painting is knowledge which creates knowledge and meaning, proof of our passing which leads us, with its questions and solutions to a continuous reflection and the growth of human civilization.This is why a painting aware of its fundamental duty, is always able to interpret, translate and give shape to the main questions of each single era, even of this one, in which a predominant culture, strongly ideological, has radically delegitimized its role, confining it with the violence of its own “no-problem” attitude, in a kind of Indian reservoir of pure decoration and interior design.If and when, a complete aesthetics portrait of how our time has been read by art would ever be wanted, then it will be mandatory to look at painting, too. Because, even in the most difficult and desperate moments, it remains one of the highest proofs of our meaning and passage, a fundamental act in the making of civilization and human community. (July 11th, 2005)

I do not paint to understand or exist (although it’s by painting that I understand I exist). I do not paint to explain myself or find my meaning. I paint to forget, to un-inhabit myself, to let myself go.

Painting happens in the silence of the words; in that space left empty by words: the space of their implosion. The word implodes because unable to name the radical difference of each figure and the one which is more exposed to the wearing of the name no longer contains this radical difference inasmuch it’s produced by the name itself as its illustration. Thus, in its nature of reiteration (plethora) it doesn’t produce the image of the figure because it lacks that unspeakable extra to nomination itself which is the true nature of the figure. Painting, which is the art of imagination per excellence operates, when void of weaknesses, either illustrative or of different nature, in that breach of the nominal language which is the extra of each figure. This, which remains the only human possibility to represent the world and therefore to build it and drag it out of the invisible and unspeakable, must keep, even when painted, that extra from which it was born.
In painting, the disappearance of such extra, inevitably entrusts it to mere illustration, which is only apparently of the same nature, but truly its strongest negation. This nature, substantially explanatory and illustrative is, unfortunately, the denotation of a lot of contemporary art, regardless of the genre to which it believes to belong (abstract, figurative, conceptual, performance and so on). The image, in order to be figure, asks to painting an incredible effort of conscious abandonment that can make it return to its sphere of natural extra, in that threshold from which everything from the undiversified invisible becomes visible, which I call “the world without man”. This has always been the real meaning of the act of painting.  (July 4th, 2005)

I believe that all this critical rave, which instead of asking itself about the true mystery of a work of art, is more worried about reassuring its own theories, has greatly contributed to blacken the real meaning of making art in general and painting in particular. In fact, we witness nowadays the paradox of a more and more popular art which illustrates the critique itself and the theory contained therein, while the critique entangle, in a perverse embrace, those images created by itself. In this way nothing really happens anymore between image and critique, if not just the ephemeral effect of the endless repetition of the latter, with the only result of a complete desertification of both. In this ‘waste land’, with no reciprocal growth, because the relationship has been emptied of the extra of the difference which is its only nourishment, we only witness postcards with captions. This is true also for those images or creative gestures whose ideological goal is that of being subversive, but in reality do nothing else but illustrate a theory.
Nowadays, the only possible transgression is to use the maximum care and attention in avoiding any possible transgression ideologically built and any contraposition with any other modality or aesthetics; the only transgression is to resist inside the image we were called to by the destiny of our gaze, even if not legitimated by any other images or any critique (obviously no other image but the one containing, in the tradition of painting, the same vertiginously anarchic and archetypal statute and no other critique if not the one born from the same threshold). (July 4th, 2005)

“A cage went looking for a bird.” (Kafka). No comment.

“From some point on there’s no return. This is the point to reach.” (Kafka). Mine was the starting point.

Despite its theoretical presumptions, which should lead it into a different direction, actually into the exact opposite direction, conceptual art is mainly a typically projective expression, subjective, and more and more often with the quality of being a diary, an anecdote. (April 21st, 2005)

Nowadays the image self-legitimated by one’s own ethics is doomed to appear obscure and subversive (even if outside what is considered such by the institutions) and sentenced to be marginal or violently invisible and denied. There is no ‘religio’, no iconic apparatus, no lecture on truth or meaning, no canons which can, nowadays, socially and culturally legitimate images as original because they are truly from one’s own origin. In doing so some of the best artistic works of our time are erased or accepted only partly amputated or misunderstood; and a truth left out to rot stinks more than all healthy lies. (April 1st, 2005)

I must be patient. Let time work. Let the water mine the stone from beneath where it is weaker. In such a way, the whole wall will come crumbling down. Only on rubble I can perform my de profundis out loud. (April 1st, 2005)

Giving up means and themes just to concentrate obsessively on a formal tension, a destination, an ethic doesn’t produce in art a frustration but a substantial satisfaction.
Like a good actor is able to hide the art of performing to enable the character to come through, just as well, a good painter should make painting disappear in order to make the truth of the figure visible. In such a process a strange paradox takes place, because what really interests a painter is almost exclusively the painting as a media and a way, and not the figure itself, which if analyzed carefully is just a pretext although consubstantial. Therefore, in order for the truth of painting to appear, it is necessary that it disappears fulfilling the paradox of the figure. So of painting as a media and way, of its endless lost gestures, nothing must be left – if not by paying the price of an attention useless to the plethora of the gesture itself (so dear to a lot of modern and contemporary art) – but the underground and longing beat of the superficial vibration. It’s painting the unspeakable of painting itself. (February 17th, 2005)

I look for figures to make them perfect in the icon through repetition. (February 20th, 2004)

I pull out volumes of nostalgia from the void left by God. (November 20th, 2003)

The fact that I still believe is only a sign of my weakness. (October 25th, 2003)

“… if the past coexists with its own present, and if it coexists with itself on different levels of contraction, we must then recognize that the present itself is nothing else but the most contracted level of the past.” (Deleuze) The density of the presence of my images probably depends exactly on that top contraction of the past, of any past.
 “Memory is actualized only when it becomes image.” (Deleuze) This is the fundamental meaning of any image.
Great painting must have the courage of an everlasting out-datedness. (September 15th, 2003)

In the beauty of nudity lies a huge, intolerable sadness. (September 6th, 2003)

“… what’s funny is the fact that subjectivity wants to be considered pure form. Any isolated personality always become comical with the fact that it wants its casualty to be recognized in front of the necessity of the trial”. (Kierkegaard) Considering this enlightening definition we understand the ineluctable comic fate of so much modern and contemporary art. (July 3rd, 2003)

My paintings are held up by a perverse logic. (May 20th, 2003)

Sexuality is physiological. Eros is liturgical. (May 4th, 2003)

I feel a drop rolling down the edge of a face and disappearing on the corners of the mouth.
We are only present. Past and future are only actualized figures although they contain all the meaning and the present is nothing else but the empty space of the presence.
The present cannot be represented, it has no figures, it is never figure. Its only figure is the lack of figures.  Only memory and prophecy can be represented. Even if I’ve always been aware of such blatancy, even before any other awareness, ‘my’ painting has never really looked for anything else but the impossible, that is to represent the figurative void of the present, to give the present its paradoxical figure, to represent the paradox of the present. The ‘threshold’ is this figurative paradox. Not the threshold as the representation of the passage, but the pure threshold, the threshold of the threshold, the absolute threshold which in turns cannot the represented unless done with a symbolic illustration, that of the threshold itself. Through the symbolic representation of the threshold I try to give shape to the unactable paradox of the absolute threshold, of the impossible present, of the mysterious passage of the being into language. This is the true ‘aesthetical’ destiny of ‘my’ painting. March 26th, 2003)

I walk, and as I walk I remember but I do not remember what I remember. Maybe it’s a memory I don’t remember. Or maybe I’m the victim of a pure memory which in its empty space gives, in a single moment, my entire life back to me. There’s a strange happiness in this memory I don’t remember. (January 19th, 2003)

Sometimes, in that moment between sleep and slumber, I think, I reason and write with absolute sharpness and  try, if trying is the right  word to use, or I irresistibly desire to imprint in my memory what I’ve written or thought or better the way I did it. Instead, every single time, regardless all the efforts to imprint in my memory the shape and content of my thinking, I inevitably, like with dreams, lose everything when I wake up. Nevertheless not everything is lost! Instead of what is forever lost a resonant void can be found, a hollow shape, another desire that in order to be fulfilled I will have to dream, think, write and paint with open eyes. The form is made of all of this as well. Of what is already forever lost. (Bologna January 1st, 2003)

Space is not just a thought, a reasoning. Space is above all an emotion, an obsession.  (January 7th, 2003)

I sometimes look up and see a tree. A real one. (January 6th, 2003)

We see nothing else but simulacrums, figures. Although, once in a while, the sweet juice of the world leaks out of them and makes the eyes of childhood wide open. Thus we understand that childhood is not a matter of age but a state of the souls, not a brief and transient season of life, but the grace of the gaze in the absolute time. A blackbird, like a small stain of ink, smears the wet grass of the pinewoods. (January 6th, 2003)

The last flurry has lifted a poplar snowdrift. In the stirred air, white dotted, the sombre vibration of a plane and the distant heartbeat of a bell reverberate.  The poplars quiver as if the coldness of death and not the warm breath of Spring had brushed over them. They have gorgeous silvery leaves and carry aristocratic bearings. I try to read but in the loss of attention I have to surrender to, there is a deep and substantial renounce to identity and presence. And I get distracted in a ooze of tiny and huge soothing sleeps.  (May 8th, 2001)

We do not paint objects. We, through their simulacrums, pursue in vain the meaning of an impossible relationship. (May 8th, 2001)
 
No inside or outside exist. Only a floating margin exists, a border in endless movement, an invisible and un-locatable threshold. That’s what we are. We are the painful border between the world and its naming. Between substance and interpretation, between world and subject. Nevertheless, neither world, nor subject exist beyond their relationship. World and subject are to be found only in this powerful, necessary and indissoluble hug of sense, beyond which they only exist simply as pure representations of themselves and the world. The representation that the subject has and gives of itself is either the changing result of that relationship and therefore unstoppable (at least until death which cancels any representation) or it makes itself and remains in a paradigm, once and for all, becoming therefore monumental, deadly and subjected to the exercise of power.  The representation that the self gives of the world, which is the world itself – since the world, alone, being such in its own necessity, gives no representation of itself – is subjected to the same polarity I’ve previously described: it can ideologically be determined once and for all, or it can change according to the conditions of the relationship which is its foundation. For the former, we will have a world hierarchically and by words ordered, built on and resembling its own creator. For the latter, even though remaining in the range of language and its representations, the world simulacrum will contain, somehow, the intuition, the perception of the radical alterity of the world itself; and the blinding light of the nonsense, the unstoppable, of what cannot be represented, will leak out as if from a crack. A representation containing its own negation, the awareness of its own human ending, of its own fragility and partiality and also the awareness that exactly only in this lie its entire sense: that is to testify the relationship occurred between human sense and cosmic lack of meaning. The images produced from a fixed and ideological conception of the world will always be , somehow, even when extremely beautiful, a kind of parody. The others, instead, those which, in the threshold of the abandonment, let the irreducible alterity of the world, its substantial un-inhabitability leak out, will always be traces of an authentic relationship. Those, who believe they can recognise something in the painted images, or else, see what they expect to see and, in doing so, never leave the vicious circle of the self, or else, see what they have been taught to see and therefore do not recognise through their own selves another experience of the self or the representation, but exclusively the cultural-visual environment they have grown in – or else, and this is the only way to see which establishes that relationship, they can do nothing else but recognise in what they are looking at, a quality of that relationship with the world which involves them personally and which is physiologically and fatally located beyond any order of speech even though inescapably belonging to it. To truly see (if it is possible to speak about truly seeing) can be nothing else but an act of gratitude and therefore an act of participation to the blindness of something felt and put into images (exactly that of painting). The image, then, contains not only the sign, the trace of the relationship the artist has had with the world, but all the possible traces which from then on, through each gaze, can pass. Exactly because of this the image is the foundation of the Community. Any Community built outside its natural foundation of images is a coercive deed and a violent act of power short lived if unable to produce – as the ministers of the propaganda of totalitarian states are so well aware of – a foundation of false mythologies able to represent and justify it. This is why I’ve always supported, against any common and totalitarian aestheticism, the profound, inescapable ethical and political being of images, whether when they testify freedom and so the need of the relation with the world and therefore always against any pre-built power, and they become constitutional of the Community they are making with their own showing; or when they support the gaze of the pre-built power by reproducing, in several fashions, the gaze of the power itself on the world and the images from which they come from. Nonetheless always distant from being authentically free, images can either serve freedom and found an ethical Community, or obey any power losing the only freedom they can grant, that of the real testimony of that relationship. It is necessary to assert, however, that no real and clear-cut border exists between these two modalities of apparition of the images. The affirmation of a clear-cut and precise separation would be only ideological if not the result of an intellectual dishonesty. Images are always mixture, impurity and destiny. (February 2001)

Technique is merely the consolation of who’s incapable (January 5th, 2001)

When we’ll all be gone, disappeared, swallowed by time, only these useless words will be left, only these tricks of lines and colours to testify the wonderful vacuity and necessity of a life, its truth, its justice, its own reality which so often, when still alive, seemed so unreal. (December 12th, 2000)

I paint in a state of absolute and perfect aware blindness. (November 25th, 2000)

My “painting” is an act of violence on the principle of reality and habitation of the world, on any theory of perception, on any artificial certainty of the possibility to represent things and the truth of the language itself. (November 11th, 2000)

Long gone the common sense I’m left with only the sense. (November 25th, 2000)

Without the world art is nothing else but an egocentric machine. (October 23rd, 2000)

I build abstractions in which hopefully a few fragments of the world will remain entangled. (October 23rd, 2000)

GRACE

If grace is feasible in the age of the triumph of design engineering, grace is, for the artist, the same as it’s always been. From Lascaux onwards nothing has changed: grace is the event of the language. To be in grace means to be in the event of the language which produces a final abstraction we call world. In it we do not create new names or stress the ones that already exist, what can be done is to make visible what it’s impossible to see or should never be seen: the primary, physiological inhabitability of the world by men. All the effort of our knowledge to hide the huge discomfort that comes from such a notion and the effort to order the world as an exclusive and soothing possession of mankind, is challenged by a single, final glance. The sight is blinded by it. And then we can finally start to truly see. The form of this being in the language – of the coming of grace – is the figure of figuring), neither the emotional and already coded object of the representation nor the programmed disorder of the expression, but the figure of time in the pure state. Paradoxically where the sight is aware of its exile –meaning that it is aware of the fact that the world is precluded to it – and it is strong enough to be able to remain in the event of the language – or rather in grace - , where – in separation – the figure happens, what of the world human beings are allowed to see, come into sight: the figure of the world. This is grace. (September 6th, 2000)
 

There is no atmosphere around bodies. They are as if cut into the light, with no flaws, no uncertainties, no elusive shadows. It’s a light that doesn’t reveal but imprint things in an absolute space and though cancel them from their being now. This light gives things and people a monumental remote substance, forcing them to an irreparable solitude. (Ponza, July 15th, 2000)

We have to learn to see into the darkness. (Ponza, July 14th, 2000)

In my latest work the synthesis between two founding opposing tendencies of my ‘form’ is becoming more and more radical: the decorative abstraction and the reality of the figure. (June 2000)

My paintings are, after all, nothing more than compositional facts. (June 9th, 2000)
Obsession is the only true object of painting. (May 9th, 2000)

‘My’ art produces the urban-planning of the final disappearance. (February 27th, 2000)

The world never shows itself, least of all when illusions are painted. in the  On the contrary only the sight which remains in the event of the language, in the coming of the figure, shows something. The so-called real in the paintings of illusions is simply a parody. (September 6th, 1999)

The world is uninhabitable and inaccessible. Our relationship with the world is the one which is established and constituted by the language. What we live in is the linguistic simulacrum of the world. (September 6th, 1999)

In ‘my’ painting the construction reveals itself in what of the exterior-reality of the world is left; the composition in the exposure of ‘my’ particular way of looking at that world (the will to put things in order) and in the colour, instead, lays the abandonment, the time suspension, the possibility to transcend oneself, the burst of the other, the erotic catharsis, the prayer and the dream. These three elements must have, in a successful work of art, the same weight, they must balance in a paradoxical, but somehow perfect, equilibrium. When this doesn’t happen, the works of art drags in time an imperfection which becomes horrible and beyond remedy. From here the highest vigilance. (June 4th, 1999)

We can say that to be aware of something (as I’m aware of disproportion) already removes it from the mandatory-irrational-assigned sphere, nonetheless this is true only when the paradigms of fate and reason are clearly defined. In ‘my’ painting disproportion comes before any paradigm, without ever becoming one: it lays in the origin of making and  seeing. Furthermore what’s leaned towards awareness it should be, blocked in a sort of monument, once and for all, and not always compromised by words in a game of fictions and elaborations. Only in a system of categories final apprehended data can exist. Disproportion comes before ‘my’ awareness and it’s intimately connected to each mutation: both mother and child of any metamorphosis. I’m perfectly aware of what happens every single time, I know that each one of my works will be disproportioned, that disproportion will be at work in each one of my paintings, that any place so created will not hold the possibility to be lived in, regardless of this I’ve never given in to the temptation, so widely common among the artists of my time, to tame this primary demon into a stylistic mode, let alone the possibility of ever doing so because of the nature itself of this disproportion. Its true structure it that of the enigma, of the unnameable thing, of the world as impossibility. I use disproportion neither for the sake of style or conceptual reasons: I’m its victim as the only possible destiny of seeing and feeling, as the sign of a relationship with world and death which can never be fully resolved in any ‘figure’. Any of ‘my’ figures is figure of the disproportion as the linguistic sovereign category of interpretation of the world. (April 28th, 1999)

I look for a perfect disproportion, one you can’t clearly see but only slowly perceive, as an omen which inadvertently sneaks into one’s consciousness, as an unknown malaise, indefinite and indefinable. This disproportion has neither conceptual nor poetic or wishful origins; has neither existential nor psychological foundations; it means nothing and wants to symbolize nothing, it’s neither metaphor nor allegory. Maybe it is simply a stylistic destiny, meaning that only in becoming visible and being made official, this disproportion finds its true meaning and such meaning necessarily passes through it. There is therefore, a perfect bond between sense and disproportion. Disproportion, at its highest, absolute, irrational and at the same time measured level is the product of ‘my’ seeing formalised into painting. This disproportion is always incomprehensible to me beforehand, I’m not even able to imagine it, it simply, fatally and inevitably happens. It begins to exist only once it’s taken shape, taken outside and let it happen. Disproportion is the supremacy of the form, the sovereign gesture of abstraction, the plane of pure painting. When I look at a perfectly disproportioned painting and therefore with a perfect destiny, I must question myself but the answer is always the same as the question. It is as if it embodies an eschatological figure. Paradox of all paradoxes, disproportion in my paintings seems the sign of the human condition in its ultimate sense, that of a destiny eminently linguistic. (April 27th, 1999)

Artists are mature when the are  in their  prophecy. Maturity means to inhabit one’s own prophecy. (January 27th, 1999)

‘My’ painting is visiting places at dusk, in those bordering moments. Often what happens at dusk is that the remaining light, low behind the clouds, still contains the reverberation of the day heartbeat or sometimes there is still a vague and indefinable light living in the heart of the shadows. The city lights are already on. The amber colour of the lamps draws cuts into the walls and stresses the blue of the sky. The place is empty. There is like an echo of disembodied voices and a vague memory of life. Houses stand in front of the absolute time, heroically exposed, opposite me and my sight reflects the enigma. I am where they are, standing in front of all the Centuries and all the evenings. My visitation never ends; it goes deep as a prayer dipped in nothing and aimed to no-one. Places, truly, never really welcome me completely; they carefully keep me on the border of their meanings but get possession of the destiny of my sight. Once in a while I dream of being in a courtyard, my grandma (who passed away a long time ago) is there, the walls around are high and the windows shut. The grass is lush and there’s a feeling of easiness as if someone is going to move out. Everything is light grey and on a corner there is a dry fountain. My grandma walks ahead of me, silent. Nothing ever happens apart from silent questions. When I wake up I don’t know if that courtyard really exists, if I’ve seen it as a child or only in dreams but of one thing I’m certain, of its absolute reality, the same reality of the places I paint. I don’t know if I’ve really seen it or only imagined it, if I remember it from seeing it or only invented, if I’ve only dreamt it or desired it, if it is the memory of a dream or a desire. I don’t even know if a substantial difference exists among these places but I know they only exist in language. And it is in this reality of the language that their reality exists. Nonetheless, beyond the staging, beyond the iron curtain of the language which nowhere can abdicate, beyond the narration of the ego, you can hear the world breathing in its figure. We are not subjects, we are places. We contain deserts and mountains. We are the empty room in which dreams crowd in. Our floor is flooded and trees guard the threshold. (December 8th, 1998)

I’ve produced, in painting, a perfectly articulated and aware language, nonexistent before. An inaugural language. This is the reason of my radical solitude and the price I pay in pages of silence. All the painting modern expressions are mere repetitions (even if honest and worth of respect). The dimension of the relationship between men and world has remained unchanged from the 16th Century and accordingly all the spatial solutions. ‘My’ painting christens a brand new sense of space built on an invisible reversal, on the practice of chaos. It does not debate on politics, it does not contrast anything or claims to be the first. It is neither inside its own originality nor babbles about new worlds. It is simply domain of a strange and normative sight which makes a final and irreparable exit from any possible anthropocentrism, even from the smartest one. (December 29th, 1998)

A great measure is the skill to contain an un-measurable passion (November 26th, 1998)

A horizon that can be seen, from far away, contains the immense depth of nostalgia. A horizon that can be only perceived, beyond a wall or a row of trees, contains the unheard depth of prophecy. (June 16th, 1998)

‘My’ painting could be defined as an exercise of visual paradoxes. (June 16th, 1998)

The threshold visually fulfil the human condition. Who does not accept to vanish in the threshold lives only in the idea of power, which has thousands of faces and disguises and is nourished by hatred. The true freedom from power is not to fight against it, but to forbids oneself from practising it, always, at all levels and forms. (June 15th, 1998)

Thematic light and shadow devour objects and places. (June 15th, 1998)

Places are not thoughts: they are what comes before any thoughts, they are what any thoughts come from and makes it possible: the fundamental absence. (May 21st, 1998)

A painting is done only when it lets itself being seen. When all ties are broken. When it throws you out of itself. (April 25th, 1998)

We live in a total precariousness , in an endless parting. ‘My’ painting has turned the parting into a monument. (April 16th, 1998)

To let go means to leave the place of the presupposed identity which is nothing else but representation of the self, image of the self. This emptiness will be slowly filled up by the life which will crawl from the opening of the waiting and the listening (vain waiting and empty listening).  (December 14th, 1997)

The greatest limitation of Modernity is to read everything merely in the light of Modernity. (July 26th, 1997)

What interests me in painting is first the combinatorial possibilities of an idea of composition. What I’m interested in is, therefore, the spatial potential (of spatial organization) contained in a composition pattern. My happiness as an artist is mainly to identify an idea pregnant of consequences, a prophetical one. Then, these forms, so happily binding, are filled with a different joy and another wonder: that is of the colour. Colour is the queen of absent-mindedness, dictation of the endless soul of the painting, body and Eros, drowning and loss of identity. Colour is that opaque mirror on the which the self has already become another but neither the self nor the other have existed before it. Colour then founds the unknowable relationship. This is why it is source of endless wonder. The idea of the composition is a preliminary pleasure in which the future is already all contained in the waiting (a platonic love) and the colour a posthumous pleasure, an orgasm. When upon a necessary compositional idea a perfectly unrecognizable complex of hues come into play, I’m always so shocked by the result as if I wasn’t the one to have created it but that the same had shaped itself through me. What comes out from completely surrendering yourself to art, throws you so far away from the work of art to turn it into a gorgeous stranger and be, because of this (and only this: a sort of exile in which it forces us to live in, an exile full of desire) the object of an immense fascination. To live with art means to try to start, every single time, this process of estrangement which leads us to desire and fascination. (September 12th, 1996)

How deep a painting is, it’s directly proportional to how deep one feels. (February 18th, 1996)

Being contemporary cannot merely mean to adhere to one’s time (as if it could be possible for men to have a time truly felt and lived as theirs!) as Modernity so widely has been preaching, but to belong to a ‘place’ in which time, in its fullness, shows itself entirely at the same instant. This is my being contemporary and my fellow artists are then: Rublev, Giotto, the maestros from Rimini of the 1300s, Vitale, Beato Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Il Ghirlandaio, and then again, Morandi, Carrà, Balthus, Casorati and Donghi. My belonging to time gives me the privilege of being in great company and allows me to avoid the decadent world so dear to those who live their being contemporary as a destiny of duress and subjection to history. (February 16th, 1996)

‘My’ paintings are always born from an idea of composition, which is never a barren project of weights and counterweights, balances and what else is considered a mere composition, but foundation of a visual place. The elements of the composition are never pure formal abstractions on which to place, at one’s pleasure, the elements of the representation, but precise spatial signals indicating a relationship with the world. The composition is therefore always foundation of the world. (February 13th, 1996)

To perfectly and necessarily harmonize all the different parts of the work of art without letting any of them lose their peculiarity. The spatiality that comes from this is the vast and rigorous one of the polyphonic compositions. (February 8th, 1996)

‘Mine’ is a disoriented painting. (November 11th, 1995)

The artist never knows anything before the work of art, neither during its making it can have access to any real knowledge. Only after, when the work is done, by questioning it, it can learn something about itself or of its being among things. This something is for someone a poetics, and for others like me, a kind of mystique. (August 26th, 1995)

A truly art loyal to the system essentially entrusts itself to the technique, which is always empty, obscene and celebratory. (August 26th, 1995) 

(Translation by Angela Lombardi)