Dipingere a memoria

“One day at the end of March Maria Morganti gave me a notebook: “Here”,

she said to me, “inside there’s all my work for the Querini”. It was her diary.

There were two years’ of notes taken down while she “felt” the colours before

transferring them onto canvas in her studio. From the summer of 2006 to the

winter of 2008. Over this period, when I had suggested to her that she might

relate her colours to those to be seen in the Querini gallery, Maria often came

to the rooms in the Foundation. Each time with the same ritual: after a brief

tour to check how the colours had changed with the daylight, she would sit in

one of the rooms and wait, like Rilke, to feel the colours of her paintings. It

was as though she were able to transfer onto absorbent paper, through her

gaze, the tones and shadings of the canvas, in a slow and progressive

osmosis. At times we were able to meet up in the Foundation, but she would

have to rush into the studio in order to “squeeze out” and apply that material

from her eyes onto the canvas; or else she had to stand aside in order to jot

down in the book her notes and thoughts about that experience…”

(For the full text see the download material.)