Where is that darkness coming from?

This darkness comes from the need to immerse myself in a space where stillness, solitude and silence reign, a series of sensations that only that black background can give me. After staring at it for a few minutes I can concentrate enough to feel myself there, in that darkness, looking around and deciding in which direction to go, where to direct my steps. There I don’t perceive anything threatening or dramatic, but only something hidden that must be revealed. As a psychoanalysis session step by step I go in search of those sensations that remain submerged in the unconscious and that most influence the soul’s states, provoked in turn by the most significant events of existence, the encounters, the losses, the fundamental bonds, the conquests and failures, the falls and rebirths, the relationship between human beings, nature and God. R.M. Rilke wrote that our being “is preserved like gold in the rock in the abyssal depths” and that is exactly what I think and what I look for in my work. The hard part is to give shape to that, which mainly are sensations to insert into a visual language where the viewer can recognize them, perceive them.

Your latest works are very chromatic and materic, any particular reason why you only use chalk?

When I first approached art, like many young artists, I painted in oil and acrylic. But I realised almost immediately that I didn’t have a real interest in working with colors, it is a practice that I gladly leave to those who have the courage to confront with sacred monsters of painting. Moreover, I found them too “noisy” compared to what I was interested in deepening and expressing. In addition, the painting process was too long, waiting for the colors to dry, mixing them to find the most suitable one, cleaning the brushes … it seemed to me to limit spontaneity, fragmenting too much the time that goes from when you perceive a sensation to when you represent it on canvas (or paper). The technique I use, charcoals, allows me to represent in a fairly short time that intuition, that image that I have in my head without dispersing that set of sensations that make up those moments, the excitement for what could come, the spontaneity of the trait, the fear of going towards a disappointment. Once the black background is made I can immediately work with rubber or other charcoals to look for the right shape to represent my sensations of the moment, but if I do not find it immediately I can continue to dig deep for hours without, like a classic painter, fear that the painting will dry or other inconveniences. In addition, it is a kind of technique where the hands are the protagonists, to spread the black charcoal to create the backdrop, the shades of light and the shadows. So, I create a kind of physical relationship between me, the charcoal and the eraser.