There are days when, standing before the canvas, I am not looking for a subject. I am looking for light.

Not the kind that illuminates everything and makes everything clear. I am interested in a different kind of light: the kind that streams in through a door left ajar, passes through an empty room, glances off a weathered wall, and settles on an object that someone left there a long time ago.

It is a light that does not explain.
It simply remains.

Perhaps this is precisely where an image is born.

Before colour, before form, even before the brushstroke, there is something that surfaces from memory. It is never a precise memory. It is rather a sensation: a room I have walked through, a courtyard, the sea seen from a window, a curtain stirred by the wind, a table left set, a door that has not quite closed.

When I paint, I do not try to reconstruct that place. If I did, it would become a narrative, a description. Instead, I seek what that place has retained.

And this is where light meets ‘Restanza’.

To remain does not mean to be motionless. It means to continue to exist in the traces, in the transformations, in the things that survive the passage of time.

Light does exactly this.

It passes through what changes and, for an instant, makes visible what remains.

On a wall, it reveals a wound.
On an empty chair, it makes one sense the body that once sat there.
On a closed door, it preserves the idea of a passage.
Inside an abandoned room, it does not erase the absence: it gives it form.

For this reason, in my painting, light and ‘Restanza’ are part of the same gesture.

‘Restanza’ is not merely that which endures. It is that which continues to manifest itself after something has changed, departed or disappeared. And light is the means through which that residual presence re-emerges.

When I work on the canvas, I spread it out, erase it, cover it. Sometimes I make it almost disappear beneath darker layers. Then I go back to look for it.

This, too, is ultimately ‘Restanza’.

Something is covered up, but it is not lost. It remains beneath the surface. It waits. And when it resurfaces, it is no longer what it was before: it carries with it all the layers it has passed through.

It is then that light ceases to be merely an effect.

It becomes matter.

It becomes memory.

It becomes painting.

Perhaps this is why, in my paintings, darkness is never completely dark and light is never merely light. Between the two lies a threshold.

It is within that threshold that I work.

I do not want to illuminate everything. Some things must remain in the shadows, because even the shadows hold things safe. Light must reach only where it is needed, just as when, upon entering an old house, we recognise something without immediately knowing what it is we have recognised.

In the end, the work often consists of taking away.

Taking away the superfluous.
Taking away what reveals too much.
Taking away what prevents silence from entering.

Until only a few things remain: a surface, a wound, a shadow, perhaps an object.

And a light that continues to be there.

For me, that light is the simplest form of ‘Restanza’:

something has passed, but not everything has gone.

And it is precisely from what remains that an image can emerge.

Karam Sebastiano Cannarella