The room where I grew up in Milan had a balcony overlooking a large courtyard. My view was that of a closed and yet simultaneously vast space. Almost as if the intimacy of my room had doubled into an external space inhabited by other people.

In a certain sense, this courtyard became the representation of my interior world brought onto a broad scale and shared with others.

On that balcony, where I stayed for hours and hours as a child, I found before my very eyes not an open sky but a wall, another closed space.

My gaze found itself bouncing and rebounding, leading me back towards an interior vision.

 

Years later, when I started to paint, I found myself examining through painting an internal, concave space that was closed in on itself, almost as though it were my body seen from within, without bones or organs. And in an effort to better understand it, for a long time I would observe and draw interiors of architectural cupolas or other types of spaces which closed in on themselves.

 

I would like to try to go even further and say that the bowl, the palette where I prepare my colours every day and which at this point has been by my side for a long time, now seems to have become the element which gathers within it the symbolic dimension of a concave space potentially capable of containing substance and imagination.

(Written in 2018)