When Fendi asked me to think about an edition of the Artists Peekaboo, their iconic bag, I couldn’t stop thinking about the childhood game of hiding behind your own hands and then reappearing,about making yourself a hiding place, seeking protection in the dark and withdrawing into invisibility. And that, in the end, is how the history of painting began, with the caves of Lascaux: bringing images of everyday scenes into the shelter of a protected space. My Peekaboo thus became a cave made from the material that, more than any other, takes me back to childhood: plasticine. Fendi’s artisans then translated it into forms of hammered nappa leather.
For my first Artist Peekaboo, it was the bag’s trapezoidal shape, designed by Silvia VenturiniFendi, that made me think of the silhouette of a ziggurat. I imagined a bag that would be architecture made small and portable, as precious as a reliquary. I made it using cement worked with a pastry bag, which was then converted into tufts of leather and fur. For the colors, I drew on Baciccio’s Triumph of the Name of Jesus, a painting that for me means Rome: a Baroque, sumptuous Rome, very far from Fendi’s rationalist and sepulchral Rome, and yet always the city where Fendi was born.
