The Happy One Print

I paint the landscapes that inhabit me and that no one can disfigure. – D. de Cicco What pushes me to go into the studio each day I could not say exactly, but I am certain that painting keeps me intimate with life—as opposed to with the death and destruction that are omnipresent in our lives—and that the painted image is, by virtue of its extraordinary immobility, a marvellous thumbing of the nose at the ephemeral and at the hustle and bustle of the world. I enter the studio like one walking towards the unknown; for the experience, and for the occasional astonishment and satisfaction at managing to extract something unforeseen from nothingness, from the initial chaos that I inevitably provoke at the beginning of each painting: a shape, an atmosphere, a universe that finds a sympathetic echo (a reminiscence, an emotion) within me and that I may ultimately – ideally – share with others. If “art is the soul within the object; not the object” (author unknown), I am not far from believing that this is the level on which the exchange between the painter and the observer occurs, and that the painting is nothing more than a simple go-between. As for my sources of “inspiration”, they are primarily plastic in origin. There is no hierarchy for me in the interest I bear towards the violet-blue of a piece of cardboard found on the ground, the branches of a backlit elm-tree, or the oversized shadow of a body in the light of a late October day.