Everything happens in the moment when the ink-soaked brush approaches the grain of the paper and suddenly deposits the mark on it. The gestures are quick, the figures communicate with each other through small strokes just hinted at, left by a tuft of the brush. Sometimes I try to draw signs without the will to illustrate, and the scene to be interpreted appears on the white rectangle. Usually in these drawings I discover small marks that I will later make larger. I imagine in the room of my studio in Rome, a camera placed on the ceiling to take a plan of my movements, from the service table, to that of gestures, to the sometimes very long stops, between one brushstroke and another.
To the ink that turns from glossy to opaque, to the signs that slowly appear. The gesture table is covered with signs, which most of the time have landed outside the white rectangle, it is as if I have an infinite world at my disposal, they come back every time I start to paint, as possible models. But the gesture is always different, and suddenly the figure, the landscape, the house stop on the grain of the paper, like a lump of colour thrown from a slingshot. The distances between one gesture and another change according to the signs that appear, sometimes it is the brush and the gesture that refuse the elaboration of the exercise. In the end, contemplation reconstructs the path of the figurative story. Mixing the types of paper is like presenting different people, the brush always acts the same, but it is the paper that reacts differently, and therefore what happens suddenly on one type of paper, on another is done slower, it needs more gestures, more ink and during the contemplation, we can see traces of the different ways of absorbing the paper.
On the table of gestures in addition to ink, acrylics, oil, choline, tempera, enamels stop, as actors attend the rehearsals of their companions, careful to the falls, suddenly in need for gesture sky/earth, participating and mixing at times in a miraculous way.
Leaning against the wall like old scenography, there are canvases and cartons, small 25x30 - 30x40 sizes that coexist in perspective with the rest of the objects. The gesture table has a central part used for work, on the right and left in addition to the materials there are piles of paper sheets: they are the houses of signs, each floor a story. At my gesture table I approach standing up, and standing up I begin my gestural exercise. Seeing the birth of what is expected a moment before, and what can become unexpected. All this I can control with my body, I have to be standing and feel the light hand ready to mark, to lead the brush according to ever more different rhythms. It is almost always a figure that I establish its position with the white rectangle, the rest will rotate around it. So for weeks I deposit drawings upon drawings enjoying, while the pile gets higher, the future moment of contemplation.