A MATERIC OPERA

I had this idea in my mind since many time ago, I realised now. Two years ago I was in Poland, for a photographic reportage and I had the chance to visit many pubs: one of them really impressed me for so many thing were hanged up on ceiling, walls and everywhere. I was catapulted in a futuristic industrial world, but the strange was that in the pub there’s so many old things, mixed up with impossible elements of an uncertain and maybe unlikely future. Let’s say “post-atomic”, but coming from cold war era! Wow, I told to myself. The atmosphere was so great: music, people, beer, everything! Funny thing was the writing on the door: “We will open at 18:30. But maybe not” 😛 It’s incredible how our mind is able to store emotions, visions, situations which are freezed to born when the conditions outside are correct. Like a seed, I want to say. In the beginning of February, this year, was the time to give to the light this vision: a sort of cyber-industrial opera, with a unique tactile experience, which would have to capture the observer at all. Uhm…how to create that? I contacted an atelier in Venice, asking to construct for me a mask, without expression basically, white, that can be painted. They were so great, to make for me two different types: similar, but not the same. I decided to employ the one more expressive for my intentions. I used glue to fix it on the canvas, let i dry one day and the day after I started with a sponge to create layers. At the end of the opera they are fifteen different layers! I obtained layer by layer with sponge, water and sand from Normandy, took by me during a fabulous trip I will never forget. There were necessary days to let the layers dry up and work the following ones by the palette knife. In this case it’s very hard to have the target in mind: never loose the sense of the result, or it will be not what we desire. Concentration, vision, intention: all these elements have to be strongly inside of us during the develop of the work. You know, during working on this art piece, it was like my senses need the connection with the earth, and the tactile experience is for me very, very important, in life. I hope for you too! It’s great to touch an art opera and to have the possibility to touch it anytime we want. It’s like a connection with the painter: You touch what he created and the connection will be forever. This is what I mean speaking about “connection” between an artist and a collector: one piece of one’s starting a new place in life… Back to the opera, I obtained this particular and unique black with ashes from wood I collected from a forest near my home and Palo Santo, that I usually burn. Its fragrance is so calming, reflecting, favouring the concentration and the connection with Mother Earth. It brings me in distant lands, but remembers me any moment the value that the time has in our lives. Are necessary between four and ten years, before this wood can reach its value, thanks to specials bacteria, which produce its calming, disinfecting, anti-depressive, purifying, magic, relaxing. It’s very important to collect only the wood which falls down on the earth, in a natural way by the tree became “old” on the ground. You can understand that nothing more than this can create a synergy between this unique element and Mother Earth. Will all that still in future exists anymore? It depends by us, all… We all are connected, in this planet, in the Universe, believe it or not, agree it or not. Nature is not an opinion! My first desire was to make a collector the owner of this part of me, this part of the Universe itself. So, the result is a 50×70 amazing, tactile, abstract opera, which can stays everywhere You desire and can let your friends ask about it and be impressed by the story on its background. The handprints are mine, to represent an individual who wants to leave the work itself, with a meaning of rebellion against the imprisonment of a limited space. I called it “Mechanical Spirit”

Here it is!