The Substitute: The Traveling Studio
How can I bring forth my own intimacy? How can I make my own inner world move around in the world, connecting the inside with the outside? How can I keep intact the sense of what I’m doing in the Museum—the public and crystallizing space par excellence—if it can be described only by words like precariousness and transience? How can I not block in a definitive image something that by its very nature proceeds through perpetual temporary motion?
When Elena Volpato asked me to reflect on a work-in-progress that would accompany the project “Diari tra Diari” (Diaries among Diaries) at GAM for the entire duration of the residence, I thought about an intervention that could emphasize the theme of the diary, meaning the way in which, day after day, a person keeps a record of his life, the slow and constant transformation of an individual’s discourse.
I saw myself moving “my studio,” the space of ideas and of work, to inside the Museum, thus giving more importance to the process than to following a form.
I recreated, or rather, I evoked the space dedicated to the everyday practice of painting in my studio, bringing the “substitutes” of my work tools and the reproductions of all those elements that make up my horizon: the “bowl,” the “replacing the infinite painting,” the “diary,” the “flooring,” the “sedimenting,” the “diarytheque,” and the “infinite painting.”
Anyone who stops by the Museum over the next months will see a work that will slowly, in layers, intensify with painting material and which, each time, will change color. The Museum spectator, through his gaze, will be the first witness, together with the artist, of an event I’d say is almost physiological. Almost as if I were a mediator, a siphon of color, she who creates the conditions so that the thing may happen, so that color may flow freely from an inside to an outside.
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