Q: How did your approach toward art come to life?
A: Mix a child screaming “Mom! Mom! Look at how I do somersaults!” with a beauty queen contestant stating: “All I wish for is peace on Earth” and you’ll get an idea.
Q: Milano – Buenos Aires – New York are the places you are split in between, how do they influence you, and why?
A: Exposing yourself to different cultures definitely gives you the advantage of putting things into perspective. You tend to identify less with the cultural trademarks of a specific place, thus become more open toward anything that is ‘other’ than you. On the other hand, if you are split between three places you are necessarily absent two thirds of the time from each one of them. So that you end up being a foreigner wherever you are, you never have a sense of belonging to a specific context. You’re literally nor here, nor there. In Argentina I spend a lot of time in the country, literally in the middle of nowhere, where things never seem to change, even though you witness birth, growth and death on a daily basis. Nature imparts you lessons that can’t be learnt from books or city life. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. Milan is so unattractive to me, I find it the best place to work in. It’s like having to go home to a spouse you don’t like: it makes you stay in the office longer. In New York, on the other hand, you run the risk of spending all your energies, time and money doing very interesting and stimulating activities, but never find the time to process them.
Q: Painting – Video, which path did you follow to approach these artistic expressions and why? Which ones do you feel closer to you now?
A: I’ve always wanted to make movies, but I’ve also always been drawing, for as long as I can remember. Once finished with high school I attended a year long Foundation Course in Fine Arts in London. After that I graduated in Film & TV at New York University, and finally I studied drawing and painting part-time at the Arts Students League of New York. At first I felt that they belonged to totally different realms, so I followed the two roads separately: on one hand painting and showing my works, on the other making short narrative films and working on film sets in the most diverse positions. It took me years to finally merge them together and not treat them as distinct investigations. I started making art videos only three years ago, and since then my work has opened up immensely. Now I can’t separate them anymore, once I tackle a new issue I will think how to approach it from any possible point of view and through any medium available to me. They don’t compete any more, they team up for the same task. In my latest installation ‘Shadow of Doubt’ I project changing video portraits on top of a painted face, creating a mutating hybrid that exists only through the juxtaposition of both. Video and painting have finally, literally merged into one.
Q: Which artist infuenced you, if there are any, in which way?
A: I think that I have been influenced by every single artist I have been exposed to. Sometimes you learn from the artists you despise more than from the ones you admire. They show you where you don’t want to go and make you understand why you don’t want to go there, and that’s no minor matter. That said, I have fallen in love many times with the work of an artist, and learnt a great deal from nurturing such love. To name a few: Bronzino, whose algid portraits are impeccable masterpieces of composition; Duchamp, who unfastened the lock of every door eventually opened in the course of the twentieth century; Warhol, for his business savvy and the desecrating effect of
his art; Viola, on the contrary, because he has elevated the standards of video art. But the artist that has influenced me the most is probably Gerhard Richter. He has always fascinated me for what he painted as much as for what he said or wrote. He has managed to contradict all the general assumptions about what a coherent corpus of painterly work should be like, by painting an image and its opposite, and yet its opposite, all of his life. His anthology ‘The Daily Practice of Painting’ is my personal Holy Bible.
Q: Which artist, painter, actor, writer, etc. would you work with, in wich way and why?
A: Brooke Alfaro, a Panamanian artist who works with the people of the slums of Panama City. Through one of his video interventions (Nine, 2003), shot in the streets and shown in the streets of the San Jose ghetto, he has managed to dissipate chronic violence between rival gang members. I would like to engage him in a collaboration piece about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Hey, you never know.
Q: The center of your artistic research.
A: Love thy neighbor.
Q: How was “The Song I Love to” born, which kind of emotions you want people to feel… Which meaning does it have for you…
A: In ‘The Song I Love to’ an improvised cast of all ages, social classes and races, mostly encountered in the streets, looks at the camera, motionless, for less than a minute each. Each sequence features the person's favorite love song as its soundtrack.
The video was shot between the streets of Italy, Argentina and New York. The simplicity of the concept is set against human complexity. The most disparate human characters, in the most diverse environments, standing still and staring into the camera, while we listen to their favorite love song, appear united by a multifaceted, yet universal, hunger for love. This very hunger is the common denominator I was after. Far away, so close…
Q: The faces that you paint are undefined, evanescent, the social coordinates that different people and stuck them in a fixed genre fade away, why?
A: In our everyday lives, whether we are introduced to somebody in person or we see an image of them, we begin forming our opinion starting from what we know or can guess about them. An introduction, or a caption, serve the purpose of giving social coordinates that let us form a first, and sometimes definitive opinion about the person.
The subjects in my paintings present no context (haircut, clothes, posture, surroundings) that might place them in a specific time frame, space or social class.
Each might be a Roman slave, a member of the Hell’s Angels, a stripper or a president. Reminiscent of masks, they paradoxically lack any of the elements that normally mask a person, so that the viewer is forced to relate to them as ‘mere’ human beings. An experience we are not accustomed to.
Q: What are you working at the moment?
A: I have just finished a video called ‘I Believe in God’ that invites a questioning of the necessity of religious conflicts. Small sacred figures of minimal commercial value whirl perpetually. When facing us they are in focus, turning around they loose definition, until they come back in a new form. So that Buddha becomes Ganesh, and Jesus turns into Aphrodite. A celestial panta rei. The soundtrack of the video is a multilayered, ever-changing mix of various religious chants and prayers from all ages and corners of the world. The sacred becomes a mutating, all encompassing experience. At the same time its various incarnations loose their status of absolute entities, and appear somehow arbitrary.
Q: Is there a project, utopic and magnificent, that you never succeded in realizing yet, and that you would like to make it real?
A: I want to weave music, dance, film, photography, drama, sex, abstract images, poetry and acrobatics all in one: so I started writing a musical for the screen, we’ll see where that goes.