the work
 
Painting and drawing have been with me since I was fourteen. A graffiti, suddenly, looked surprisingly different to me. My father (in his youth a painter) encouraged me to do more. Others pushed me too, and friends have never been absent since. No doubt I felt a drive, an appetite, a genuine eagerness. Hesitations and doubts could never obscure or hide to me a basic belief: painting not only made sense, it was truly indispensable. However, despite the permanent nature of the endeavour, activity has always been irregular: intensive periods were followed by hollow ones, until opportunity, time, enough expectation and mental vitality gave rise to a new outburst. The wish to handle pencils, brushes, paper, canvas or any other material came back, to be sure. A flow of lines and colours takes place, an organization of the space, providing an enormous relief and a deep pleasure. Where just seconds, minutes, hours or a day ago, there was nothing, suddenly there is beauty, and intense attraction. A new element in our world, a creation.

What is the message? You can see, so why don’t you look? Long enough, often enough, look around you. Use your eyes, live through your eyes. It will give you sensational feelings and it makes good sense.

My way to carve space passes through abstract art. Since abstract art means freedom, individual freedom. Also a liberation from the object, from the representation. At last, forms and colours do not end up enslaved: in people, landscapes or things. Maybe they translate impact, movement, and empathy and strive.

No doubt painting means getting out of the mould. It means departing from the routine and the everyday grey. Leaving behind constraints, intractable issues or environments well-known and provoking inertia all too often. To paint is giving a chance to one self, freshening up, thinking anew. But it is also a quest for communication.

A bare hand, with a little help from a tool, a mind void of hurdles, will lead to the nakedness of the sea, to movement and rebirth, turning a quest into images. Architecture emerges, punctuated by encounters, intersections, interruptions, curves and crossings, grids, nets, construction. Tensions surge and lead to surprises and challenges. Speed is of importance as well as rhythm. The water available, the stickiness of the paint, the truly individual steadiness of the hand, each and ail of them determine the caress and its imprint. Lines and forms are not without colours. Together they trigger desire and lead to unexpected fulfilment. Eyes suggest, almost dictate gestures and initiatives, when a space has to be filled, where emptiness should be respected. When a balance has to be looked for, or where it should be safeguarded. Making decisions, necessary, obvious decisions, many of them, sometimes hastily, sometimes quite late decisions. Each of these, whether hard to climb or smooth and gliding, is a good moment.

Is art not proof of our ongoing journey, carried by the will to understand, to enlarge and improve, by our vocation to explore and deepen? Is it not an adventure in which we can share or we should share?

New York 2002 HW