For years now, I have concentrated daily on the ascetic practice of erasing all traces of white from my A4 sheets of paper, with a relentless gesture of completely covering them with strokes of ballpoint pens. This erasure, by successive layers, gives rise to a new iridescent-oily uniformity, at first only blue or black, now also magenta and red, and the reiterated movements of the hand and wrist are charged with that sacredness typical of meditative rituals to which I openly appeal to counterbalance our frenetic present. In the act of erasing white, Time expands, and it becomes the very matter of the work. It is, however, in the final composition on the panel that the gesture-mantra manifests itself in its entirety: the sheets are chosen and placed side by side so that an alchemy is created that is capable of opening up to an infinite continuity beyond the space of the work. A revealing light emerges from the darkness and that gesture that is born intimate offers itself to the public, urging it to stop and interrupt the alienation of which mass society is victim in the age of the visual. To the bulimia of images and visual chaos, I oppose a silent, slow abstraction: by subtracting figurative elements, recognisable forms or signs, I leave room for a greater awareness of the void and the unrepresented, inviting the observer to a moment of contemplation and introspection. In a contemporaneity so immersed and submerged in the continuous flow of images, the very meaning of vision is annulled. Therefore, through the processes of subtraction and then introspection, and abandoning our natural inclination to gestalt perception in favour of more intuitive and evocative sensations, I emphasise the need to develop new modes of resistance and reflection that can restore depth to the visual experience.
