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Dear Maria,
What is Fuori dal quadro (Outside the Painting)? We are used to seeing intuitions encapsulated in an artwork. But your sheet of plastic splattered with colours says something else.
I know that the splatters, the marks, the residues – around the outline of the canvas you placed on top of the plastic – come from your gesture of spreading one colour on top of another day after day.
You say that you want to contemplate the intimacy that opens towards the exterior and that the encounter with the Women’s Bookshop in Milan made you see the protective sheet as a membrane of the life you live. That’s why you decided to put it in the shop window.
The traces, the dregs, the clumps, might be a “casual/natural” aesthetic, but in your decision to make a work out of it, I can see what leads you to make a decision.
Giving shape to what lies around the decision is the enormous task all of us face. Recognising the traces, even when they are undefined splatters, helps us to “design” our awareness. Maybe we could avoid having to see an analyst; we know that art can help in this.
Your sheet of plastic that covers the shop window, making the inside and the outside transpire, has a finished form that goes beyond the gesture of spreading colour and not worrying about what splatters outside of the painting. It is about looking inside ourselves with an awareness of what is around us.
In art, when an intention finds an effective form it is no longer a good intention but a point of evaluation.
You, you ask yourself what you leave around you and that is why you created a site, where you tell your story. We, looking at your shop window, we ask ourselves: what do I take around with me? What do I leave outside? You are right. Fuori dal quadro could only have come about at the Women’s Bookshop in Milan, where these questions – like your colours – are a daily gesture.
Francesca Pasini
