Many of my works begin with a series of “What ifs?” What if Napoleon had returned from the Italian campaign by bicycle? What if the Archangel Gabriel had not found Mary at home to announce the coming of her son? The series of watercolours on paper Fuga da Giverny (“Escape from Giverny”) begins with another hypothesis: Monet’s escape from Giverny, the small village in Normandy where he lived for many years and painted his water lilies.
This would have deprived us of his most celebrated paintings, of those magnificent studies of water and its reflections, as well as of a fundamental reference for twentieth-century abstraction. I therefore imagined that the artificial pond built at Monet’s request, once abandoned by the painter, would gradually dry out, allowing all the images reflected on the surface of the water to settle onto the bottom.
After all, a watercolour is nothing more than pigment carried by water, which settles onto the surface once the water has evaporated.
