Many think that a painting is born when the painter takes up the brush. My experience has taught me that it is not so.
A work begins much earlier. It begins in a silence, in a memory, in a light glimpsed for a single instant. Sometimes it is born from a door left ajar, from a chair left empty, from a wall worn by time or from a corner of the sea observed hundreds of times without realising that it held a story.
The artist does not invent the world. He learns to look at it with greater attention.
Every image I make is the result of a wait. I do not seek spectacular effects. I seek that invisible presence that continues to inhabit places even when people are no longer there.
It is from this research that my idea of Restanza was born: what remains when everything seems to have ended. It is not nostalgia. It is memory that continues to live in space.
I would like to invite the reader to do a small exercise. Stop for a few minutes before a place you know well. Do not be in a hurry. Look at the light, the shadows, the marks of time. Ask yourself which lives have passed through there and which emotions that place still preserves.
Perhaps you will discover that every space tells a story. You only need to learn to listen to it.
This is how, at least for me, an image is born.
Karam Sebastiano Cannarella