Marco Delogu

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I have spent many years drawing faces from various communities out of the dark: Venetian farmers who reclaimed their land from the marshes, jockeys in the Palio of Siena, cardinals, composers, and prisoners. I slowly began to insert something from the prison or the apartments of the cardinals into the background of the picture. At one point I felt the great desire to not respond to faces, to not find myself in the faces of others and to be alone and walk in nature. At the beginning I turned my big and bulky camera towards the earth; after a while I turned it more and more towards the sky, towards the light. This is how the white natures are born, works that will then lead to the «black sun». The desire for white to challenge the fra- ming increases until a balance is reached between white and the few signs which signify a presence of the world chosen by me: a branch, a flower, something that moves in the wind, is not clearly defined and blends with white, with that feeling that concerns my interiority and that turns towards the light.

All of this is to explain how I was immediately drawn to the works of Monica Ferrando, which I saw in a studio in Vetralla when I went to assess how many of her paintings I could put into a collec- tive show dedicated to «white». In Monica’s studio, I immediately decided that all of the works should be included and that I should dedicate a solo show to her in the great hall. Monica accepted the blank canvas, and I imagined her looking at it and deciding what could come on that canvas. A slow process, whereby a bowl, a rope, some milk, potato skins, nails, crumbs and salt gradually emerged and were painted on white. Monica knows poetry well, and I ima- gine her «white» paintings as a constant erosion, at first mental and then physical, exactly the same erosion process that a poet under- takes with words. Then there is a subsequent state of this work, a state that in London on a sunny late-spring morning I shared with Monica: the process of preparing these works for exhibition. That morning we understood how all these paintings work perfectly, to- gether and in a line, on the same white wall.

I would like to exhibit these works in other spaces, to prove their immense potential, to see them respond in different ways to different rooms. Sooner or later!