Qubbah is a site-specific project designed for the space of Masseria Cultura, in the Valle d’Itria. During a residence work, it has been brought to reality inside a seventeenth century construction made of dry stone. The typical, local, dry stone huts, trulli – in the shape of a square, topped by a keystone vault, under a conical roof – have prompted the artist’s reflection upon the idea of a Mediterranean architecture at large, bringing together Eastern and Western sacred traditions: the Islamic qubbah (a cupola) on one side, the Roman Baroque cupolas on the other.
The traditional dry stone practice, with its absence of binder to keep the stones together, recalls the nomadic tradition. Quite the contrary, the artist’s choice to paint the construction itself, by using pigments and concrete, originates from the desire to fix those stones back at the time of their laying, in the seventeenth century.
The work results in an impasto painting, a sort of thick cloak wrapping the stone structure as spontaneous as a lichen or a crack in the wall would be.
Qubbah is a painting characterized by the swirling depth and the shade of a seventeenth century ceiling: the perspective melts and the space vanishes in the infinite.
