Works
Six cycles, from 1962 to 2008. Each image opens full page.
Early works
Inks, temperas and washes on paper: the debut singled out by Francesco Arcangeli at the «Mostra d'autunno» in Palazzo Re Enzo, where the mark thickens into clots of shadow and the yellowed paper is already matter.
Arthur Rimbaud
Material and textile collages after the Illuminations and Une saison en enfer: deep blacks, ambered papers, veilings. “The perpetuation of a splendid legacy of independence” (Lino Cavallari).
Gothic novel and new horror
«La scena del delitto» (The Scene of the Crime), a scenic-pictorial environment at the British Institute in Bologna: textured white crossed by vivid gestures. The opening featured a debate with Umberto Eco, Giovanna Franci and Guido Fink.
Art and Fashion
Evanescent busts and presences over grounds of sand and lime for «Arte e Moda: incroci e contaminazioni» at Palazzo Isolani: painting confronts the absent body of the garment.
Art & Fashion Design
Ivory surfaces traversed by slender writing, presented at the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles with «Vulnerable White Hangers», concluding the programme «Art and Fashion Design: Cross-Fertilization».
Graffiti — Signs of Memory
The painterly reworking of graffiti and wall traces gathered over fifteen years of travel: lime-white canvases and nocturnal ones, asemic writing, photographic fragments surfacing from the ground.
The exhibition film
The signs of memory
When I walk through the city and look at the signs on the walls, I first feel unease; then, almost at once, indifference: the homologation of images and meanings shared by most graffiti is plain for all to see. They are too many, everywhere, all alike — and I hold them partly responsible for the loss of empathy towards the urban landscape. And yet a few of them have stirred the deepest interest, and not only among the young.
Over the years I have photographed many of those walls, in Italy, across Europe, in the United States. I carry all those images in my mind — unpredictable, unexpected, ruled by a sense of absence: fascinating and misleading images that seem to tell us everything while hiding it all.
Throughout my long research I have sought to carry into painting the intimate bond between text and image, the aesthetic balance between sense and non-sense. The marks left by time and weather can turn walls into paintings by Tàpies, Fautrier or Kandinsky: these are the muses of the works, traced on the walls of Bologna but also of Lucca, Prague or Los Angeles. My mind slips into neutral, and the signs on the surface become childlike lines and distant dreams.