"Enchanting Traces"
The magnet clanged quickly on the floor and then it ran up, along the wall. An army of little rectangles in order on a shelf started then vibrating and one by one they ended up by being sucked on its black tips, like caramel flakes. Suddenly, from right, Donald Duck sprang, drawn from his bottom by an invisible thread and in a flash he ended up himself by being stuck against that horseshoe, his white feathers creased and little yellow stars all around. Before he had fallen in a bathtub in the middle of a room on a big red and yellow carpet making a lot of light blue sprays which, however, didn't make the puddle.
The whiz of the projector licked the walls and an afternoon numbness enveloped us quietly. Beyond the cloth of the checked shirt the warmth of the neighbouring arm; shoulder to shoulder, tight legs, stuck to the plastic staves of the benches, the hands resting in their hollow; sometimes, shy, a movement of the back. The darkness was full of the warm light of the colours. Flowing and strong they came inside us.
Then it came the Christmas tree, honeyed, full of red candle lights and sparkling balls with tinfoil threads; and right after here came Pluto, him also shiny, orange with black borders. He moved in a supple way until he stumbled over the coloured paper packets with big golden bows and bright corners, and he fell on the floor, thoroughly flat.
And then sometimes the big pumpkin with its rounded painted face: with a candle inside, it became all orange opening its large and saw-toothed sneer with the triangle nose. Then someone, maybe Mickey Mouse, left the house and hung it there, next to the wooden edge of the door.
Mary Poppins always came in profile, coming down on the bias with her big black umbrella swept away by the wind, then she closed it and knocked at the main door. Indoors, from the black bag, a lot of things kept on coming out, even a very long chandelier and then everything came back to their place. The drawers opened and closed and the golden knobs stayed there, all in order.
In the end the light came back. First of all the yellow one of light bulbs and then, mixed with the noise of the roller shutters, the white light of the sun which made us rub our eyes; and there, in the middle of the room, on a dark stool, that buzzing small device, which was next to us and that previously we didn't even dare to look.
Things came inside us, thick and shiny. They slipped down on us, from the eyes to the whole body, mingling warmly one with the other. The air was saturated with their colours which licked our face with silky lights. Heaths of mysterious universes up there on the hidden ends of the pieces of furniture; endless worlds in which going for a walk caressing old and new toys.".
I like talking with people about my works very much. In front of the observer's eyes, the work gains independent life and it becomes at the same time a little bit more mine; gathering impressions, satiating many curiosities, I discover elements subtended to its planning and realization which I wasn't fully aware of; it's a direct exchange of thoughts from which I often come out enriched.
Writing about one of my works, in particular about this last one "Millibar" - for which I find the title of the exhibition "Accumulation" appropriate -, brings me some difficulties instead. First of all because of the character of the words printed on the page, defining but in a way also definite; and then, more intensely, for the inevitable intellectual nature of such an action, for the filter it risks to put between the work and who's looking at it.
I'd like that "Accumulation", at least at a first impact, was enjoyed on a perfectly emotional plan, why not sensorial, enchanting the observer with the charm of the surfaces wet with light and colour, the suggestions of the crumpled matter, the warmth of the thick pile of heaped elements, to the proliferation of an overabundant fullness. To some extent as a baroque architecture, with its "horror vacui", it proposes to strike senses through wonder. In front of this chest of drawers covered with toys, in front of this magic bedside table circled with a rosy light, I would suggest to become children again and plunge into the charm of things again; not because a similar emotional way is more valid than others (to everyone the choice to get their own suggestions out of the work), but just because it retraces in a measure the path that I followed during their creation.
I went down into the corners of memory where images of far-off years are harboured, years in which the plastic surface of a toy was a thin barrier you had to go through to sink into its very wide world; years in which the lights of the Christmas tree were the way through a magical universe; years in which I left from the coloured page of a picture towards my fairy-tale; years in which I stroked the polished little pencils' sticks with eyes and hands, enraptured by their graphite scent.
Or, perhaps, things were then simple and dumb as today, pure objects made by a particular material, finished at their surface, and only in the memory they're soaked with warm wonder. The merry-go-round with its little horses, one different from the other, the little train with its irregular coaches, the crumpled-like car want to be the object as it is in the physical external reality, with a shipment of suggestions in addition, the swarm of sensations that it had then or in the current memory of that hour.
The shapes in a certain way organic because not perfect, each one endowed with a own personality, diametrically opposed to the serial object reproduced in a thousand copies, the shapes that talk about the hand which gave them life, want to be bearers of this emotional shipment.
Finally I have to add that in my work, alongside the role of memory, the pleasure of playing with the matter strongly arises, and weaves a continuous dialogue between the suggestions provided by the material and the situation represented.
text written in relation to "Accumulation", set up at the Marco Noire gallery (November, 1994)
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