Notturni (2021)

Notturni, the name with which I titled my box, is a continuation of a pictorial project started in 2018 that bears the same title and which revolves around the idea of residue understood as something that comes from a cycle, from a path, understood as something visually identifiable, but which we are not always able to grasp at first sight. My box contains a series of ash samples collected between 2017 and 2021 born from the combustion of old paper material that I found in my home (such as letters and documents) and which has now lost its importance. Combustion is a way to return elusive information, to make visible the stratifications that matter contains in the form of hidden and indefinite memory. Through combustion, the scraps of everyday domestic life are converted into tiny elusive particles, organic elements passed to another life that retain the traces of an intimate experience. I collected the ash deposited by the fire, mixed it with water and used it as a pigment to paint small monochrome watercolors, uniform surfaces that make you think of samples with almost imperceptible tonal differences. The almost “ritual” operation produced a set of compositions with a strong astral, nocturnal component, also closely connected to the musical aspect of the term. The work I propose is the attempt to reveal the essence of what remains - and which therefore resists - to total dispersion, the attempt to bring a remnant back to visibility, to restore its meaning in an image.