There are places that seem empty, but are not. An abandoned house, a room that has stayed closed, a courtyard worn by time can keep holding the presence of those who inhabited them.
You do not need to see a figure to sense its passage. Sometimes a half-open door, a motionless curtain, a table on which an object has been left are enough. They are minimal traces, but they can tell an entire life.
When I return to the places of my childhood, in Portopalo di Capo Passero, I do not see only what exists today. I see again what was there before. The simple houses, the streets, the sea, the boats and the men who set out while it was still dark. The present continually mingles with memory.
Even when people are no longer here, something of them remains. It remains in the walls, in the objects used every day, in the arrangement of a room. Above all, it remains in the light.
The light that comes through a window does not only illuminate a space. It can reveal a lack. It shows the point where someone sat, worked or waited. This is why, in my paintings, light does not erase absence: it makes it visible.
A place preserves memory without the need for words. It does not recount precisely what happened, but it holds a sensation. Whoever enters can perceive a presence, even without knowing the story of that house or of the people who lived there.
In painting I seek exactly this: not the exact reconstruction of the past, but what the past has left behind.
For a long time I painted the body and the figure. Then, slowly, I felt the need to look at what remained after their passage. The figure disappeared, but the space kept speaking of it. From this awareness my work on Restanza was born.
Restanza is not only what remains materially. It is a presence that resists time. It is the mark left by a person, by a gesture or by a waiting. Something we can no longer touch, but which keeps living within us and in the places we have crossed.
A ruined wall can hold more memory than a photograph. A crack can become a threshold. An abandoned bed can speak of an absent body. An old object can recall the hands that used it.
There is no need to add many elements. Often a light, a shadow and a trace are enough. The rest must remain in silence, so that those who look may also enter the work with their own memory.
Each of us owns a place that we keep carrying within. It may be the house of childhood, a parents’ room, a street, a beach or a garden. Returning there, we realise that time has changed everything. And yet, in a corner, in a scent or in a reflection, we suddenly find again what we thought was lost.
Perhaps places remember differently from us. They do not keep the facts, but the traces. They do not hold the voices, but their silence. They cannot give us back the people, but they keep showing us the emptiness they have left.
To learn to look at a place, then, means not to stop at what appears. It means recognising what keeps living behind a door, upon a wall or within a light.
Because a place is never only a space.
It is what happened there. It is who inhabited it. It is the time that passed through it, leaving a mark.
And it is, above all, what remains when everything seems to have gone away.
Karam Sebastiano Cannarella