Returning to the Marche, where I was born, with an invitation to work inside Bar Luce and at the reception of Residenza La Ceramica in Fabriano felt like coming home for Christmas Eve dinner. You recognize the tablecloth, the dishes, the relatives, but you realize something has changed. A sense of disorientation the Germans call unheimlich.
I created the work Festone, in pigmented concrete, which climbs above the door leading from the bar to the courtyard like an architectural callus or a festive mushroom. An element both familiar and alien, a volume in search of escape.
At the entrance of the residence, as if it were a misplaced fresco, a second intervention in pigmented concrete invades the cloakroom and the reception desk: a blurred image, like the oblique memory of an altarpiece, worn down by time and distance. The steel handles, made together with the Elica bending department in Mergo, are the only sharp detail, a tangible grip on an image that fades away.
At the far end of the nave, beneath the cross vaults, stands a third work, Cremisaria: a round painting in pigmented concrete on a red wall, which I imagined as a vanishing point. The name of the work refers to the history of crimson, a pigment derived from insects that for centuries were mistaken for berries. A disorientation that runs through the other works as well: a sense of familiarity that wobbles, and a desire to feel at home even when one no longer is.
