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self portait / archiving oneself / cataloguing it (the substance)
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# 27.05

Cataloguing it (the substance)

An operating system


 
After forming (following the process I wrote about in the previous paragraph), the substance is then catalogued, kept, collected and conserved before finally having the form of an archive substantially composed of a series of devices, of casings.
 
The ‘Gestureplace’ is the situation that allows the action to be constantly reiterated and is the space where all the substance that has formed slowly over the years is stored and archived. It is the place where the painterly gesture, the possibility of regenerating the expressive action, the possibility that humans have of continuing to leave a trace of their existence in this world, is taken care of. In this space, as well as the tools for painting, such as the ‘Bowl’, there are also those I call the ‘Archivers’: the ‘Diary-theque’, the ‘Sedimentary’ and the ‘Infinite Painting’.
 
The ’Diary-theque’ is the space that contains all the ‘Diaries’ that have been created and all those that will gradually be filled in over the years. The amount of wood that is held inside it is enough to cover the span of an entire lifetime.
 
The ‘Infinite Painting’ is contained and supported inside an easel-container which on the one hand acts as the artist’s easel and on the other as a case which protects it.
 
The ‘Sedimentary’ is both the production site and the storeroom. On one side, the wall where I paint every single ‘Sedimentation’ and on the other the space where the paintings are catalogued in chronological order and in order of size. More than an ‘Archiver’, essentially it is a storeroom that is filled and emptied constantly, always maintaining a certain measure of the quantity of things that can be handled in a certain physical and mental space. It is a sort of quantity balancer.
 
Starting to catalogue was a triggering process. As if the discovery that it was possible to make things remain on this earth primarily by merely listing them, brought out something latent in me, something I already had inside, in explosive fashion.
As soon as I started putting one thing next to the other with a certain logic, giving each thing the same breadth, the same weight, the same importance, with no sense of hierarchy, I had the distinct sensation that this would be the right method to help explain my way of feeling time, of making visible the consequentiality of things, of considering each step as an incontrovertible given and of supporting my need to never let anything go.
Not only did I understand that it was the rule that kept the work going, but also that gradually my actions became the very shape of my work. Over time, compact, unitary configurations were slowly made concrete; they contain within them, in the repetition, the sense of the sequence of events.
 
 
 
 
 
(Text written in 2022)


 

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