When summer began and even before it officially started – it was about the first days of June when nights noticeably take more time to arrive – I wished to spend the months until September being creative and awake, able to gain impressions and carefree enough to express them. Today, if resumed, I can agree that I did live the time between May and September fulfilling this desire, losing track of the days passed, looking at insects with deep blue-black wings on orange dots, fallen fruit and tangled plants and appreciating uncertainty of summer’s curious occasions.
June 1st happened to be on a Monday; and I decided to begin building the new work from that exact hour by drawing: figures, as much and as variable as my brain and hand could turn around and represent. What I wanted was to create material I could forget enough to love again later and include in the new images planned to be elaborated in the summer months once I leave the city to move the studio on a higher altitude in the woods. In this first week the figures were counted 35, many I cut out and 3 I indeed liked – a couple of months later they were included inside Holdgo Leton’s tree, the earliest artwork made that set up the atmosphere and the direction for my interests during the entire season. I was working outside and if not under the hazelnut with ants and ladybirds falling regularly on my head and drawings, my studio was on the terrace where at midday eyes could burn from the reflecting graphite and paper being screamingly white.
The switch in environment, from town to village and from streets to forests reset my approach to work and surroundings so the second half of summer got me more out of the studio and into life and in nature inside what is my definition of gaining impressions. Those are happenings, sceneries and meetings with mainly four legged or hoofed; I promised to draw them all with the utmost patience, attention and care. I also starved to paint, paint as immense and vaguely as the landscapes surrounding me; colours were chosen and selected in a way to surprise myself in an unusual palette with brighter tones of terracotta, flesh and perylene that would also let me achieve the foggy mud I am comfortable with and in. Later and deeper in the season I described 10 sheets of landscapes as curious, interesting and different, not yet artworks but done with a great amount of joy and pleasure; nothing is completely clear which is an exciting moment I am going to appreciate. 6 out of these 10 evolved reflecting on what was around me, shaping into images with the course of days as my desire was to absorb the place and let it happen in my work with its assortment of fences, road signs (official and handmade) and tiny details.
During drawing sessions, while walking and just before falling asleep, ideas appeared from time to time but as fragile skinny thoughts crossing and yet to be eventually developed – I signed them carefully because these are the easiest to not remember; Trash Tower in its essence of conserved futility was one of the floating thoughts marked down on the distant June 25th. Those notes usually left me with the feeling I should know more in order to continue so I went out the studio to gather memories and reflect through uphill walks and hiking
– I create my work by drawing, painting and walking because walking is helpful not just for digestion of food but to assimilate experiences and reflections as well –
until my head is empty and up to think again.
After one of many walks and during an afternoon, while placing the works on the floor in order to see them I was able to notice a black structure changing in shape and measure but present in each piece as a bell, a bridge, a fence or an abstract or not plant shape – a shapeshifting presence to underline and unite, the black structure in bold to which I gave emotive importance because its disturbing heavy essence developing on and inside bright and colourful backgrounds fascinated me. It is intimidating and unexpected as the woods and resumes the entire period in which I continued defining spaces wondering about the shape created by fences and if they are necessary in order to protect or isolate because boundaries are many and of all kinds, some marked with barbed wire and some even invisible.
Today is past the middle of September and the months spent elsewhere feel and seem like a curious dream from which I woke up too early with the unique option to try and bring back in detail throughout the day while completing the pieces. They should be ready as the feeling begins to pass and the dream becomes demanding to remember: 6, about a mutt that can bite and a fall of a tree, a home that is a hotel and flying fly bands made of plastic.