The blind son

 

An original piece from the series “They sleep on the hill”, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm, 2009.

In the “Spoon River Anthology” the poet Edgar Lee Masters tells the story of the people buried in the cemetery of a small imaginary village. In Italy, the singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André published a famous collection of songs inspired by the anthology; the first piece of the collection is titled "They sleep on the Hill." I imagined to evoke in each of these paintings a little story about a person or an imaginary group of people. I try to make the story not too explicit but only vaguely mentioned. It may be a hidden love story, an underhand secret, a family conflict or an unpunished crime. It's not too important to understand the events involving these characters. After all, when you browse through old family albums you discover the faces of people who have become too unknown for the time spent, and we try to imagine how these people have lived. What connection linked them? They were happy? What really occupied their thoughts when the picture was taken?

Goldfish

 

From the series “In the absence of God”, oil on thick paper, 29 x 50 cm.

The medieval illustrators represented animals that they had never seen, described by others, or derived from mythology. This generated monstrous creatures. From here comes the idea of a common set of animals, which are deformed with the help of redundant decorative codes.

These artworks are made on paper overlaying subsequent layers of oil painting and pencil drawing (I often use graphite not only to emphasize the traits but as a color itself, to fill and darken entire areas of the drawing).

New cities

From the series “Code”, oil on thick paper, 40 x 40 cm, 2020.

When we consider a road map or a map of the territory we note that they contain different information that are represented by different means, according to the purpose for which they were created: each time we find colors, symbols and words that recall a precise meaning. What happens if I take these techniques of representation, these symbols, and take off the scope for which they were created and mingle them with each other? Will it be for the reader a text in a foreign language, that is meaningless, or through the world of associations and references that each of us possesses, will generate a new language and associate to those images a new meaning? In these paintings, the invention of the map of a city is only a pretext. Gradually, by changing the shapes, colors and the hierarchy of associations between the various elements I explore the possibilities of changing this language increasingly moving away from its original meaning.

 

MY GRANDFATHER WAS A LIGHTMAKER

Every family has its own legends. Those of my family are centered on the figure of my grandfather. My grandfather made his living by inventing a thousand jobs: he was a blacksmith, but also an electrician, carpenter, handyman ... In his small village of origin, before the war, public lighting had not yet arrived. He was asked to build a street lighting system, he did it. As a boy, I often fantasized about helping him in this enterprise, which would have been impossible, because he died before I was born. But I liked to imagine myself carrying these big heavy lamps between the houses and the courtyards, where, in reality, some of those that he built are still working!

Oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm, 2020.

Diagram of a city

 Oil on paper, 12 x 30 cm, 2019.

Motorcycle

Oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm, 2019.

My grandfather died before I was born. Although I never knew him, the domestic legends that my mother and father told about him helped to create, in my childhood fantasy, an almost legendary figure. My grandfather was a blacksmith, but in the post-war period of the small Italian rural province, this meant a handyman, and in fact, if necessary he was a plumber, electrician, bricklayer, carpenter. In our country house we had for years and years, the very old and beautiful red motorcycle that he used for work. And I've always imagined him riding that motorcycle, racing from one village to another, to solve problems and rebuild a nation.

Doha, the pearl

 

These paintings are part of a series of pieces that were commissioned from the FIRST QATAR REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT COMPANY. The copies of these paintings have been used for the wall decor of the rooms of the new Hilton "The Pearl" in Doha, Qatar.

This series of paintings is inspired by satellite photographs that today, with tools like Google Earth, allow anyone the virtual exploration of the planet. Starting from those real images, I rework those aerial views, inventing new codes of representation and new decorative elements. The map is distorted, deformed, altered as if it were a past memory, but something of that place is still recognizable. For the views of Doha and Qatar I invented decorative elements starting from the sands of the desert: the waves recall the ripples that the wind draws on the dunes, while the areas with "dots" are an ironic reference to the grains of the sand.