“Poring over Judith’s skirts, there in the World’s Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli – and not Botticelli alone, but many others too – had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone.
Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the highest art to express. But in Judith’s skirt I could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old gray flannels.”
This is Aldous Huxley in “The Gates of Perception”, where I think he makes clear how one can see the wonder in simple and common things.
After I completed my technical education in a small hick town, I started to investigate hungrily the world of the arts and to scan in my surroundings for the seeds of what I was gradually becoming aware of. Day by day, while walking about my small cosy town devoid of any architectural connotations – a place where the notion of art is distant and at any rate related to a traditional local perspective – while seeing the same streets and meeting the same people, enclosed in such a poorly motivating daily life, I felt strongly a need for oblivion. I felt like a Sufi dancer who spins his body incessantly around and around.
When whirling dizzily, you end by losing your points of reference and, inevitably, you disconnect from matter and from utility, to the point that endless perceptive possibilities eventually open to you.
My home has become a special place to make a metaphorical adventurous journey. Though unconsciously for a long time, I started to leave behind a lot of things and, as a consequence, I found myself with an empty space I could fill with my visions.
All the things that had lost their shape in my whirling started to blend and get a new meaning and vigour. The claustrophobic place where I lived has become a source of endless discoveries.
“It may happen that you get lost at home” is the title of a work of mine and is at the same time a poetical statement.
My works tell about the urgent need to freeze these visions, which are intimate and domestic but also universal, because they affect everything around us. Freezing one possibility out of many, hurriedly before it fades away, using tricks sometimes awkward and always evident, is a way to emphasize the precariousness of life. I try to give my works an unresolved look to tell they are only temporary. Also, the fact that I always make clear the method I work with keeps my works away from “sculpture” and closer to the innumerable possibilities that are implicit in the things.
A long journey into daily life, where the elements get a different value when you simply move them or bring them closer. This generates a short circuit and makes you doubt about the most evident things.