For most of my life painting has not been among my priorities, despite the fact that I have been familiar with it since my childhood. Then in 2010 something clicked which made me start again in a very intensive way and since then I haven’t stopped, to the point that over the years it has become my main activity, and also my job. I remember well what set all this in motion, namely the desire to devote myself to something accessible and at the same time indefinitely complex, able to enthral you for a long time, a silent activity that could be carried out from start to finish all by yourself. A series of circumstances made all this emerge in a very precise moment, and so far it has never faded away. To answer your question more directly, I would say just a need, ignored for too long, and of which today I would no longer be able to live without.

I’ll be very honest, the act of painting gives me so much pleasure that it ultimately requires no other motivation. It has an impact on many different levels and among all of them, I think the sense of discovery is so strong to keep regenerating my motivation. Clearly, over the years I needed to structure and focus my work, the process became more complex and in general many things changed, yet at its core that feeling has remained the same.

I think it is a very clever and suggestive statement, and we can read it as an invitation to produce vivid paintings, but colour/light and sounds are different physical phenomena, not influenced by each other and that our body reads with different “tools”. Yet biological and cultural elements create connections between them that we cannot ignore and our language, in an attempt to describe them, often mixes images and sounds. So we might say that a painting has a clear rhythm, or that composition has dark tints. An image can be noisy, or a song very colourful. It’s just another way to discuss and share something really hard to put into words, and in many cases, it is useful to find a common ground and introduce someone to a lesser-known language. By the way, I don’t think the process of abstraction in painting has a founder or a beginning date and I don’t want to recognize the juxtaposition of figurative and abstract images. For me, it’s all part of the same representation and narration which have been with us since the beginning. However, there is no doubt that the painters from the last century, such as Kandinsky, played a crucial role in opening Pandora’s box. 

It does so by trying to put in relation their formal values, their fundamental and constitutive elements, their gestures. Attempting to translate the elements of one into the other and vice versa, in order to establish a dialogue, a link. This is not an exercise in style, nor do I aim to prove anything, as stated above music and painting are two different and independent disciplines. But they are sisters, and they often wear each other’s clothes. And this dialogue helps me as I work to solve visual and musical problems, and I think it helps the spectators too as they have more resources to read what they’re seeing or hearing.

Contemporary art is a very vast phenomenon and I don’t think I have the analysis and synthesis skills required to properly answer your question. It is difficult to establish its direction if indeed one clearly emerges, but for sure a key element is the mixing of different mediums. There are contemporary works that manage to combine new languages and traditions with tremendous skill, intelligence and still maintaining a strong sensorial impact. For example, the installation “Can’t Help Myself” by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu (Venice Biennale 2019) or “Senza Titolo” by Giorgio Andreotta Calò (Venice Biennale 2017) come to my mind. They also succeed in establishing a strong link with the audience without any need for a cultural mediation or introduction, another aspect that I really appreciate. With that being said, I think, although so many new paths have already been covered, even in the ocean of contemporary art, painting can still have its own role, its uniqueness and will always keep its mystery.