What are you inspired by when you paint?
As I said, the main source of inspiration are the events that condition the human soul and how it reacts. Those events that leave deep marks, scars, in our unconscious which in turn tries to forget them, to hide them. So, I draw by my biography, my past or by what happens daily and that inevitably affects my balance, my psyche. This is what I also have tried to represent in the past through sculptures or environmental installations. In Paris in 2013 I presented a sculpture composed of a glass box with water and two volcanic stones inside, one white, light and floating, the pumice and one black, heavy, the obsidian. These two stones were formed as a result of an eruption, but in the beginning they were volcanic magma. I then tried to represent how that catastrophic event, the eruption, had definitively upset the state of that element and how consequently this had to evolve into something else. Also in this case I wanted to show how certain events mark us definitively.
In a big environmental installation that I did in Rome in 2010 I filled a big space of 250 square meters with twenty cubic meters of pumice stone, creating a white expanse, an apocalyptic landscape, and on this placed some Jericho’s Roses, desert flowers that always survive despite the hard environmental conditions. That too was meant to be a representation of how the human spirit reacts to hostile surrounding events and conditions.
What is your work’s main concept?
“Find” those signs, those scars, those memories, and the related sensations that the unconscious or ourselves hide to survive it, and then find the right language, the right forms to express all this on paper or sometimes through other media. I am trying to create my own vocabulary of images composed of natural elements, trees linked together, roots, branches that break, or figures that constitute barriers, limits, boundaries or paths. Every day in the studio allows me to discover something new.
What are you working on at the moment?
Right now I am working on a new “night walk”, a new series of drawings where nature and psyche merge to create a path that man is forced to cross, to analyse the past, exorcise it in some cases, thus ensuring that our current personality, in the present, is firmer, to prepare for the future, aware that all the sensations already experienced will return to cheer us up or torment us. I like to think, quoting Rilke again, that God (or the divinity that is in us) is “hidden in the shadows that our life creates”.