He set out to take it to the limit, without drama. To work to the limit, taking up fabrics and plastic sheets piled up in the studio. Squeezing the little paint that was left out of the cans, giving it of itself, diluting it with water, with alcohol, until it became almost translucent, but not because he was looking for that quality, but because he decided to work from exhaustion, from lack, from the will to finish at the very moment he found the last of the scraps and plastic waste. He noted as a sign: "to work at the limit of the material's strength, when it is running out". At the same time, that sensation of finiteness (somewhat liberating) disappeared little by little like water down a drain semi-clogged with the remains of hard paint, and it was there, in that murky pool, that the thought of closure floated, draining away, leaving behind it a dark coloured residue that he looked at with disinterest. His determination was in the agitation between paint and space. "Paint is punk", he read on a social network. 

They had just assembled the cortinone, a set of large-format paintings assembled together that emerged from the will and the residue that holds wills. As he didn't have enough space in his studio, he set up in an industrial studio run by artists, to try to see what the piece wanted. There it was composed in another way, a rough way: circles were allied with coloured dyes; and crows, skulls and fires were folded apart. As they carried the piece back to their studio, they both wondered about what united them during the assembly processes: "something cheerful and dark at the same time, like Mediterranean", said their colleague. There remained the medieval, an iconographic flock (skulls, fires) made around the cortinone. He would use the exhibition space as an object: the larger paintings as cuts in the space and, as in medieval churches, drawings and small pieces in the openings.

This relationship between the past and architecture led him to Venice and one of its islands, Torcello, to his Byzantine mosaics of the Last Judgement, which he had seen months earlier on the façade of a basilica. Not that he was particularly interested in the mosaics, what he marvelled at (apart from the scenes of bodies burning in perpetual torment) was an angle where the tesserae rotated to match the curve of the architecture. From that particular corner came to him the full dedication of the craftsmen, the dedication to no time. "It is concentration that gives intensity to the work," he noted, quoting Vivian Gornick.

Back to the studio. The outdoors. He saw only meaningless objects around him, precarious physical presences and a whole body, a machine dedicated to it. The outdoors. He opted to remake earlier pieces (he returned to "working at the limit of the material"). He painted on the back of some of the canvases: the liquid colour ran through the textiles without preparation, ignoring the separation between their faces. He used scissors and glue, he sewed badly. He was encouraged to submit the work to a kind of sacrifice. Then he remembered what an artist wrote to him in the 1980s: "...the exhibition in Basel is over, I am tired and I ask myself, why don't I work in a more complex and more meaningless way, more 0, more not". And he visualised his collage with cut-up furniture fitted into a giant window.

Torcello's mosaics followed a plan, a predetermined pattern. In his studio, the pieces were associated by random logics, listening to those correspondences that occur between facts and things. He also forced their relationships, he glued them together badly. There was a kind of disaster and joy: the insolence inherent in the processes. The exhibition Meteora brings together a group of paintings made between 2021 and 2023. Two small pieces made in Rome in 1986 introduce it as a formal nod to his current work.

The exhibition revolves around the group of recently produced paintings Circulos deambambulantes (2023), a series of pieces in a playful exercise with abstraction, which includes Infierno (2021-22), paintings with figurative elements. Most of them have been made with materials recovered from the artist's own work (textiles, wood, plastic sheets), based on direct techniques (impregnation, spillage) and through processes of breaking and reassembly. From this succession of paintings comes Paredes blandas (Soft Walls), three large-format pieces anchored to the architecture and suspended from bars (transport handles) that cut the room into strips.

"I cross the ruins of a poisoned land still believing in miracles," said Jonas Mekas. "Serene with precipice," he said to himself. Without drama, pushing it to the limit.