The works are photographs transferred onto wooden boards and then worked in encaustic with waxes and natural resins. The images are only apparently monochromatic and have an antique flavor, but if they are looked at carefully they are unquestionably contemporary.

 

The subject is an anthropized lake,  even if people are rarely seen, usually just their traces. A mysterious lake.

 

The lake is formed by myriads of tiny drops of water, it is a meaningful representation that existing is never stable, it is nothing but floating waves, it is a set of vibrations, it is a world of events. The lake is a large mass, much larger than a person but still distinguishable by them. It always looks the same, but every moment it changes because it is a balance between input and output rivers, between rainwater and evaporation. Humans are not present or are not the main subject; in the works there are traces left by humans; the anthropization of the lake is an obvious presence even if it is an ephemeral imprint left in a short time, around and in a lake that was before us and will be after us, even if it too has a short life on a geological scale and infinitesimal on a cosmic scale.

 

The language used manifests a verisimilar vision of reality, not a true one; reality is illusory, blurred, slightly deformed. The works seem to be monochromes, under certain lights even black and white, but then it turns out that they have shades, green and yellow colors, some light blues, warm blacks. Absent is pure white, there are only apparent whites. It is an invitation to attention. If we are not very careful in looking we are not able to see reality, it is the implicit fact that we are tied to a fallacious retinal vision, incapable of experiencing reality. This same sight, the sense we rely on the most — we use it distractedly but we trust it blindly. The atmosphere, the color are the result of my imagination, the application of the memory of certain atmospheres that have been superimposed or mixed with the real ones. Often there is a green that is part of me, it is that green when the sun has set behind the mountains and heralds the passage into the twilight that precedes darkness. Usually this moment is said to be the blue hour, but in the case of the lake surrounded by a lot of green from nature I see green predominating. It is a phenomenon of soft and colored light, it is suggestive and exciting. It is a space of silence, contemplative. It represents a moment furrowed by a subtle melancholy that, however, contains great hope expressed by the yellow of the waxes in the skies.

 

Is it photography, is it something else?  The starting point is photographic, its execution is typical of a pictorialist photography: the application of vignetting, the reference to the vocabulary of pinhole photography, the use of a reduced chromatic scale. But the digital interventions, the wooden base, the coloristic intervention through the choice and use of waxes and resins, the structuring of the surfaces with red-hot irons lose the indexical value characteristic of photography and open up to something else. We are on the fine line between index and icon. The use of wood, of image transfer, of waxes and resins, in truth, takes us into the terrain of mixed media.

 

The choice of a slow technique is also a personal condition that favors reflection and reaction to contemporary times in which everything is consumed rapidly without taking the responsibility and the pleasure of the slow discovery, of the deepening of ourselves and of what we are capable of learning and doing, precisely through the practice of slow doing.

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