February 2022
Q. What first inspired your practice?
I don’t remember when it happened, since when I was small, I was drawing all the time. Everyday after school, my father would prepare a canvas and colours for me to use, in this space created for me I was free to paint. What kept me on track was the fun. Art has many terms in common with the game: play, enjoy, jouer, giocare. At the base of everything, there is the game. That is being an artist there is a playful, playful, childish part that absolutely must exist and that must never be suffocated.
Q. Can you describe a day in your studio?
Everyday I do something, I work on something every moment of my life. There is no division between my private life and my work at the studio. One thing is reflected in the other and each idea asks for time to settle and take shape… It’s always hard to get started, to find the right calm to tune in to yourself and eliminate distractions and thoughts. The first few hours are often an attempt to tune in and concentrate. Then after a while, everything comes to you, you no longer fight with the matter, you let go and things start to work out.
Everything brings together all the beginnings in the studio: I always start with drawing. Sometimes from imagination or from life, developing notes about a particular experience of light and colour, or recycling pictures and all the sorts of visual imaginary. In my studio, I am surrounded by lots of drawings. But they’re a thing in themselves. You can never replicate the same feeling. So, often I draw something and realise I’m never going to make a painting as good as this drawing. They are a world in themselves. They’re not just a sketch for the bigger thing.
Q. Tell me more about your subject matter?
For me subject matter is my excuse for painting, everything around me is composition and colour. I take my subject from my drawings, and my drawing is inspiring by the works around me.
When I begin to draw, my subject matter reveals itself to me. When I begin It has as much to do with the method as to do with the subject but, when the drawing is completed, I see my subject matter in the drawing.
I often find materials or colours that suggest a story and from here begins a chain reaction that leads me to make a journey inside the painting. During the process, the subject reveals itself and points you to the next steps of the research. With each work, I always take a small step forward…
I’m often surprised by what the outcome is. What is important to me is to create a space where I have a free hand to see through drawing. This has led me to many different subjects.
I always have an idea of what I’m going to make, or what I want to make. But I try to keep this idea as vague as possible so that I can focus on what I am doing while I am doing it. This allows things to end up being what they are and not what I want them to be. In my work I always feel the need to chase a theme that I have not yet caught, that moves and keeps opening, expanding possibilities. In my urgency to create, I become lost and discover a new self.
Q. The quality of gestural mark-making is evident in your practice. Tell me more about the
significance of mark-making processes for you?
Drawing is my animal breath and when I draw I can’t afford to think about what will come out… the game, if it is a serious game, does not admit distractions. Every mark composes its grammar, its language. The hand is a seismograph that dialogues with the eye. It is an emotional method that starts from a deeper capacity of initial observation of the subject and involves the realization, !in one go” of the first image, without second thoughts and much fewer erasures.
Q. How significant is the element of serendipity in your practice, particularly in
printmaking?
Printmaking is filled with happy mistakes, unexpected marks and movements appear throughout the process. Prints begin with guesswork and end up with discovery, it’s never going to be exactly what you think and every print has a life of its own. There is a new avenue to pursue at each stage of the print process. What is an artistic search if not the continuous search for the error, mistake, accident? Only the accident saves us from the custom of perfect execution and therefore from boredom.
When you make a mistake, an unexpected journey is unleashed, rarely codified because every mistake is original, a bearer of uniqueness and unrepeatability. It’s the main reason nature always surprises us and terrifies us. There is no storm like the other… nor an earthquake. Beauty lies in the mystery of unpredictability. That is why beauty terrifies us.
Looking for error is like plunging into the mystery of beauty. Forget the cliché “you learn from your mistakes”. I don’t want to learn, I just want to keep making mistakes.
Q. Who or what has been your greatest influence as an artist? Which artists most inspire
you?
If I have to distinguish between two great roads traced in the 1900s, I do not choose Duchamp but Picasso: the artist who does not even go to the laboratory because he is already in the workplace, every day in operation, and everything he finds becomes a stimulating element of regeneration, without asking too many questions about the fate of the work.
I always feed a lot with painting of all kinds.
Now I’m looking at the painters of the ‘Bay Area movement’, Wayne Thiebaud, his colours…
Q. What is the most challenging element of your practice?
The most challenging part is listening to my work when it’s finished when I should destroy and when it is becoming something different. Sometimes the mood is affecting the life of the work and learning how to step back and give the work rest. Having the courage to remove your ideas and auto referential loops from the painting process is difficult because for some ideas what you want to happen it is so strong and it blinds you to what is happening. This is a gestation of a painting.
This work is also the result of lucky moments. The important thing is not to insist too much on the bad days, when it happens it is the confirmation that you are a giant fool who does not give peace. In those cases, what would be recommended are walks in the mountains, a swim in the sea.
Q. Can you talk about the importance of craftsmanship for you?
In painting (the one that requires all the application and humility of the !craft”) I think it’s important to learn the rule before breaking it.
Every material behave differently. Has its own rules…
The colour forces it to be explicit, oil paint does not have the mystery of ink, it is not interior, it requires to be open to the world and speak frankly.
The relationship with materials is a choice that follows from the project. In painting, there is always a physical relationship between the idea of the painting and what is realised. I mean that a painting is also generated by a tactile idea, by the sensory ability to relate to things and people.
Q. How do the processes of drawing, print-making and painting relate to each other in your
work?
Drawing is how I ask a question, informs everything, the answers it gives guide my practice they inform painting and print differently. But behind every successful work, there’s a population of drawings, each providing their outlook.
The work in the printmaking workshop enriches the painting and vice versa. Moving from practice to practice helps me find creative solutions to solve problems.
Q. How do you see your work relating to tradition and contemporary art practice?
Words like traditional and contemporary I find difficult, for me to paint is to contribute to an endeavour alongside artists from the past and the present, we are all seeking blindfold.
The alphabet of painting has always been the same. The vocabulary is always evolving but we are trying to speak the same truth.
The vocabulary of painting is fixed. All we can do is put a brush on a canvas. The individual aspect of art is the artist. There are always new artists that interpret the vocabulary of painting in their way, and that’s the exciting and wonderful part of it.
Q. How do different environments inspire you, for example, your time in London and Italy?
The approach to my work between those two environments is completely different, really I cannot say that one is better than the other. These two polarities of my life enrich each other…
London is a city in constant motion and the geometric rhythm of the landscape is reflected when I paint here. Because of the nature of the society and also the climate I found myself working and living the majority of the time in indoor spaces. In the studio, I have the opportunity to develop the first thoughts of the ‘plein air’ and work more in-depth on techniques and themes.
In the studio I’m pulling out my imagination. It’s more an internal dialogue in constant search of something. And then whatever happens here in my head, in terms of wonder, is something that, to me, is very unique, and I don’t find anything that’s equal to it. It’s almost like meditation. I’ve always noticed that my mind can wander extremely freely, and
that great ideas about the world that surround me, come to me while I am drawing and painting.
When I’m back to Italy, I work mainly on-site and outdoors because my relationship with the space changes. The light and the landscape is calling me to produce spontaneous captures in outdoor spaces. When I start drawing or painting in the landscape, time vanishes, I feel to be part of a bigger breathing picture.
Q. What are the latest developments in your work?
Currently, my work is concerned with the exploration of landscape and colour. I am discovering a new potency inherent in the forms and colour themselves.
The latest developments are pushing my work to be more independent from the representation. Self-sufficient spaces, landscapes, which from context has become the subjects. I’m starting to see an underground narrative dimension, as if the landscape told itself.
