What are the main themes and inspirations of your artistic research?

As a young man I was fascinated by big questions, perhaps because of my introverted character or simply because of the classical studies that brought me closer to philosophy and literature. You know those questions bigger than man like: where does it all begin? Where will it end and why? Why does Man exist within the wider system of Nature? Is there a distance between man and nature? These questions broke into an identity and a fragile body that asked for more, an infinitely smaller and more intimate scale, who are they? What should I do with my life? What is love? How different is the world inside from the world outside? Now that I am young and old, these two worlds have compressed and their immeasurable distance has been reduced, the macro and the micro world at times intertwine and overlap. Before I was looking for answers to questions, today I ask questions that are not even questions. Maybe my theme is just stripping the arguments, eliminating the objectives, making some thoughts hyperdense. Many times I happen to imagine myself in another form of life, with another time and another matter, such as a mineral or a plant, this helps me to change the paradigm.

Why are Sicily and Palermo so significant in your art?

Sicily is the land where I was born and where my roots are made. It is an island that is almost a continent in itself but is surrounded by a sea that has cradled many other cultures. It is a land of hard black and pungent rock born of volcanoes and destined to erode until it becomes dust as it will be for me. My relationship with Sicily is a relationship of identity, not only cultural but of nature.

Tell us about Matṛ [मातृ], your latest exhibition in Milan?

The exhibition hosted by Francesco Pantaleone Gallery is accompanied by a text by Domenico de Chirico and has a very troubled history. I was supposed to open in Milan on April 15 and the title of the exhibition was the Latin phrase “Nisi respirent twenty, vis nulla refrenet res”; it is not the first time that Nature surprises me and is guided by chance that it almost wants to play with me. This verse is a fragment from the liber VI of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, an attempt to explain the atmospheric and catastrophic events of nature: its translation is “If the winds did not cease, no force would hold things back”. I find it very nice that the idea of ceasing is expressed in Latin with a beautiful verb, Breath, as an action of rest. (It was a comment on the senseless race, in pursuit of the world, an invitation to stop. Because of the Covid we all experienced a moment of stalemate, in the end everything stopped, so many certainties collapsed and some more, some less had to to deal with the absence of motion.