Can you tell us something about your training and the cultural references that have influenced your
recent work?

I had teachers outside the strictly artistic sphere; with them I started to deepen my knowledge of various
subjects, from cinema to architecture to psychology. The passage to more specific readings, like
Arnheim and McLuhan, was fairly predictable, but for my work in that period I drew instead on wenders,
raves or the web, which was just starting to be available to everyone. I would say that the cultural
references most present in my recent work are sociological ones, studies by authors like Milgram and
Goffman for example, who have investigated at length relationships among people and social identity.

Erving Goffman and Stanley Milgram – which texts and passages interested you? I’d like to understand
how they are reflected in your painting.

In the case of Milgram the reference is perhaps more immediate, especially with regard to his research
on ‘familiar strangers’, that is, people we encounter almost daily – at the bus stop, at the corner store,
on the street – and with whom we have no direct interaction. But as Milgram maintains, it is nonetheless
a real relationship in which both parties accept not taking the rapport further, with no hostile
implication.
I photographed people for a long time in a few pre-set places (and I also followed some of them because
they seemed like curious characters), then worked on blurring their outlines and creating new
groups, juxtaposed communities that have never actually met in the same space at the same time, thus
recreating situations possible only in fiction.
In this way I recreated on the canvas a sort of new social map: new identities and casual relationships
based on gazes, automatisms, elementary points of contact – the theater of the everyday, in the sense
of social representation as described by Goffman. In my work of the last few years, I then eliminated
what the scholar defined as ‘territory’ (any space delimited by obstacles to perception), erasing all
elements that would serve to create a recognizable location (bars, interiors, architectural elements),
erasing or juxtaposing background and forestage.

In what way do you think painting can still constitute an Ideal medium for representing these ‘weak’
relationships?

The eternal question about painting! I don’t know whether it’s the ideal medium to represent something
or arouse feelings; it’s my medium and it’s one possibility.
It always has been and will continue to be, and I don’t think there is any conflict between representative
and self-reflexive function; honestly I don’t think I want to assert anything in particular, it’s just
that at a certain point I known that what I have in mind is the right image, for what I don’t know.

even though I reflect on or get into theories that I feel pertain to me in some way, once I’m in front
of the canvas I never know exactly what’s going to come out or how, or whether it will be of any use;
I can only count on my experience and my capabilities and on the tools I have available, and delude
myself that what I’m doing is meaningful for someone. As Richter says, at worst it’s an offer I make to
anyone who’s interested. I enjoy painting, but I’ve always distrusted anyone who says he paints only
for himself: as artists, we are egocentric and we need approval, we are compelled to share our work,
so painting is also an opportunity to explore our selves.

Tell me about this text-image interrelationship that seems fundamental to both your dialogical desire
and you latest experimentation.

As I was telling you, I’m not interested in narrating “a” story and hoping everyone gets it; everyone
has his own past, and that’s what I hope my paintings work on; I offer a possibility for a story, the one
I see and the one the viewer sees when facing one of my paintings are necessarily different and always
changeable, otherwise I think it would all be terribly boring.

Since you say the approach to the medium of cinema was fundamental in your training, even though
you don’t use film but rather photography to create your images, can you explain your relationship
with cinema - how does it influence your capacity for narration?

I maintain that cinematographic narration is almost always explicit and serves the images; on the
contrary, looking for a reference in my more recent work (in which text appears in a clear way, invading
the space of the canvas, while before it was only present in the form of a title), the approach is if
anything closer to Burroughs’ theories, that is, the interrelation between text and image isn’t intended
to explain or to narrate, but rather to create a short-circuit that modifies the associative laws that language
imposes on us, and to bring about different thoughts or memories. As Guston wrote: “I don’t
know a painting is, nor what induces people to paint. Perhaps it’s things, thoughts, memories, sensations
that have nothing to do with painting itself. The painting is not the surface, but the plane that
is imagined for it. It is the plane that is set in motion in the mind.”

In that sense does the extensive use of white take the surfaces back to Manzoni’s tabula rasa?

yes, I find that it’s a similar thing; in Manzoni’s a-chromatic whites there was the desire to an infinite
space and thus infinite meanings, although he let the work create itself in a way; but in my paintings, I
cover something that still exists underneath, I erase the ‘territory’ with plaster, precisely to avoid giving
references that might somehow guide thoughts, and thus reduce the power of the image.

Why, when you talk about the ‘imagination of the plain’ do you cite Philip Guston and not De Chirico?

I don’t know why I cited Guston and not De Chirico, perhaps because in my figures in motion I find a
certain “resistance on the part of shapes to lose their identity,” that is, my subjects’ resistance to losing
their role.

I’ll quote a passage from Statues, meubles et généraux, 1927: “More than once, people have observed
the curious aspect that beds, wardrobes, mirrors, sofas and tables manage to take on when we find
suddenly find them in our path in the street, in a scenario in which we are not used to seeing them,
as on the occasion of a move, or in certain neighborhoods where merchants or shop owners display
outdoors, on the sidewalk, the main pieces of their merchandise. All of these pieces of furniture appears
to us in a new light, gathered in a strange solitude: a profound intimacy develops among them,
and one might say that a mysterious sense of happiness creeps into this restricted space they occupy
on the sidewalk, in the very midst of the animated life of the city and the continuous coming and going
of people; an immense and strange happiness issues forth in this blessed and mysterious island,
against which the resounding waves of a stormy ocean would break in vain.”

It seems to fit my experimentation: the common denominator is the change in perception one obtains
by modifying the factors of the context. I maintain that it’s a further demonstration that everyone
perceives what he’s ready to perceive, or already has inside him. for De Chirico, furniture abandoned
on a sidewalk gives an impression of happiness; for others, an empty chair might arouse a sensation of
abandonment or sadness.
I find this reflection to be inherent in my work, especially in the attempt to change parameters and
annul prejudices.