Why choose water as the subject for an exhibition?
About water, its structure, its states, its meaning, its irreplaceable role in making life possible, its distribution around the world, in our cells, its life-cycle, its lack, its role in territorial conflicts, and even its memory, more has been said written painted photographed and moulded than possibly any other subject.
It may well be that this exhibition isn’t so much the result of a project, rather it stems from the fascination this element has always born on me along my whole life.
Most likely the hours I spent staring at the never-ending motion of waves, ever different, ever consistent, or the ones spent floating in tepid waters swarming with life, or spent appeasing my thirst sipping litres of fresh water, or observing from high up above a river meandering across lands, the journey of a drop of rain, or ecstatic at the shape of a snowflake, most likely it was such experiences that inspired me these works.
Moreover water, brimming with livelihood, can take on infinite shapes and, with its motion, its solvent features, as a medium for dilution and suspension, changing size with temperature, it can modify its surroundings, mould and define coasts, shores, stones and caves, dig canyons, build stalactites and stalagmites, wear goods away and allow the creatures that inhabit it to forge new landscapes and destroy old ones.
The challenge I never gave up on is not so much the presumption to paint or forge something new, rather the research of the right material and technique, the ones best suited to represent the most mobile of all elements, the most vital, impossible to fix and trap into a still lasting work, this has been the unreachable goal, the contradiction in terms, because only water is like water… this is what prompted me to create the works you’ll find here, this is what I’ve achieved so far.
I don’t know when exactly my passion for water began, it is likely to have begun with me, and it has been with me for all my life.
I remember when I was a teenager, I would get carried away by the evolution theory, the one that infers a semi-aquatic life for the human species ancestors. Such a theory, I thought, not only explained many of our physical and behavioural features, it also provided the fascinating description of a life intimately joined with water, and it was to me not only desirable, but also very likely.
Each and every one of us is familiar with the pleasure we experience when immersed in a hot bath because, without bothering to bring in psychoanalysis or symbolism, we all know this is the environment of the beginning for every human being, it is the “where and how” we spent our first months of existence, it is the long-lasting hug that readied us for life.
If I am able to stir, in those watching these works, a minimal fraction of the pleasure, wonder, curiosity that water has been and is still raising in me, this project will have reached its reason-to-be.