A friend of mine once said that our only guideline is our effort to rise above the constant rubble produced day after day in the studio. In writing about this exhibition, I want to underscore this unceasing endeavour, which is predicated on a direct, physical bond with materials and the obstinate perseverance of working. “What is it that makes us work with such tenacity?” Natalia Ginzburg wondered in Il mio mestiere.

I write a text on plastic, a material I use as a container for accumulated remnants and leftovers of paints. I transcribe a text that addresses geologies, detachments and recycling of organic material, and of ourselves, in the midst of a cyclical, dirty and devastating process.[1] I repeat the operation with another “plastic container”, this time with a bizarre text.[2]Over time the two materials (plastic and text) turn into the rigid, tattooed shell of a body that undertakes “a disturbing action”. In the two texts I discovered—either in a mineral/material or dreamlike/surreal tone—what was, for me, the practice of working in art.

The way in which plastics and texts are combined did not follow any prior script or strategy. Rather it simply happened during the working process as a consequence of the slow time enabled by the studio. If the work flows it is because we push it, and this constant pushing comes from the conviction that “it is something that has to done all your life long”, to fall back once again on Ginzburg.

I try to draw the image for a scene from a film: a large insect crawls into the open mouth of a sleeping teenage girl and she swallows it. I record this scene, isolating it from its narrative context; and from the audio I extract “dark within….”[3] And this is where the title of the exhibition comes from. It also gives the title to my latest series of drawings—which I returned to after dyeing them with black and red gouaches—furrowed with grids of lines and superimposed drawings. I view this group of works as an exercise in “worldly introspection”, akin to the continuous motion that goes with those outskirts from which the shell of inner recesses is conformed.

[1] Max Frisch. Man in the Holocene. The New Yorker: New York, 1980.

[2] Antonin Artaud. “Art and Death” in Selected Writings. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1988.

[3] From David Lynch’s series Twin Peaks, 2017 “This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, an

d dark within…”