PAINTING MACHINE
Ice and video installation, 2009
Like in a ritual sacrifice, the ice, drop by drop, offers its essences to fill the canvas with colour. The hanging “bodies”, which drop on the white fabric, have a clear symbolism, but it is a ritual in which the main weapon is time and the objective is not to honor a vindictive god, but to honor the colour as material and the hazard as creator.
Jackson Pollock stated that his painting did not come from or belong to the easel. His interest in the American indigenous tribes brought him to a kind of painting where the materia and the fact of painting itself acquire a spiritual sense. "I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting".
I seize somehow Pollock’s strategies, like dripping and putting the canvas directly on the floor to give it another turn of the screw, and turn it into an aseptic version of the action painting, where the artist is not involved at all, and where pasion and feelings go away to give prominence to the concept of process. The idea of error disappears , but direct contact is substituted by an alternative experiment of creation, where the pictoric materials are the pigmented ice cubes hanging from the ceiling.
The production contrasts the developing action: the slow melting of the ice, getting away from the idea of the painting as a catharsis, and of the passional part , usually related to the action painting, where the body moves, dances and submerges itself in the canvas . Through the methaphore of the ice, and through the distance taken by the artist, we find coldness, even in a phisical way, hidden behind the camera which documents the fact of creation. There is no action or intervention on my side during the process; I do not rely on feelings or personal expressions, allowing the hazard be the one who carries out the work in a spontaneous way.
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