The Need To Shut Up. On Why, How and What I Draw.

1) My art starts from my obsession with books. Books are objects. They are maps of the world containing pictures and words. To me, pictures and words are very close. Michel Butor writes: “Painting is also something we read… literature is also something we look at.”

2) My art is small. Reduction multiplies space. I draw and paint on paper, then cut out the figures and glue them on discarded book covers or found boards. My cut-outs are often so small that I need tweezers to move them and a lens to see them: minuscule teeth, nails, eyelids, drops of blood or sweat. The best way to look at my art is to get as close as you can and to read it like a book.

3) My art is made of figures. These figures come from other figures. It’s thirty-seven years that my eyes collect images. My head is full of them. My figures are mostly faces. They are made of paper, but somehow they have a sparkle of desire of not being made of paper.
There are bodies too, and things that come out of bodies’ orifices: words, farts, smoke, breath. There are houses, and there are animals and masks. All figures are cut-outs because I don’t see the world as a whole and I don’t want to represent it that way. Nothing is a whole. Everything is in pieces. Our bodies are in pieces. I like to put the pieces together.

4) I like paint, glue, ink. I like art that you can see with your fingers. In my work, texture is the trace of the work: the pressure of the pen in my hand, the position of my body on the chair, my time spent, the imperfections of paper, the smudges of ink that my thumbs leave. Texture is when figures come from different sources, when figures look, to the fingers, different.

5) I am not a painter. Often my pieces are referred to as “paintings.” They are not paintings. There is paint on them. But the figures are drawn before they are painted. The main influence of my painting technique are children’s coloring books. I haven’t found a good word for my pieces yet. Maybe “cut-outs.” I like “drawings” too, because everything starts form drawing.

6) I started using my art to make animated films when I realized that animation is the core of my art-making process. In constructing my pieces, I move the cut-outs on the surface, looking for dynamics, narratives, until I find a placement I like. My animations document the way I make my pieces. I wish my pieces would keep moving like my animations, instead of being the same all the time. Ultimately it’s my pieces that document my animations.

7) My work as an artist is strictly related to my work as a writer. My drawings are illustrations for unwritten stories. Illustrated books (and I don’t mean only comics or graphic novels) are for me one of the highest examples of the possibilities of combining words and images, literature and visual art. Illustrations seem to be just a comment about the text, but in fact they are a parallel text. Illustrations cheat: they seem to tell the same story as the words, but in fact they open other possibilities. Illustrations remind me of the presence of the unwritten world waiting right outside the border of the page. My drawings live in the blanks of language – they are a sort of anti-language, of anti-literature. I need to draw because otherwise I would collapse under the weight of my own words. I make art when I feel the need to shut up.