There are places that never stop speaking to us. Even when they are empty, even when time seems to have come to a standstill, they keep holding something invisible.
The house is one of these places.
I am not speaking of the house as a mere building, but of the house as a repository of lives, of gestures, of affections. Every room keeps traces. A table, a chair, a curtain stirred by the wind, a bottle forgotten on a shelf can tell a story more than many words.
In my artistic research the house has become, over the years, a place of memory. Not a museum of the past, but a space in which time keeps being present. People disappear, objects remain. And it is precisely in this permanence that the feeling I try to paint is born.
Many of my most recent works are born from empty rooms. There are no human figures. There are no events to recount. And yet something happens. The space holds a presence. The light seems to keep a memory.
Perhaps today we are afraid of silence. We fill every moment with images and information. But memory needs slowness. It needs places in which to stop.
When I enter the Artist’s House in Portopalo di Capo Passero I do not see only walls and furniture. I see a life that keeps speaking through the things that have remained. Every object is a testimony. Every room is a page.
Painting, for me, is born precisely from this listening.
To paint means to give form to what can no longer be seen, but which keeps existing in the memory of places.
The house thus becomes a silent archive of time. And the artist does nothing but try to make its breath visible.
Karam Cannarella
10/07/2026 Il Giornale OFF