Why some places are never forgotten
There are places we cross and places that, instead, cross through us.
We may visit them only once, live in them for years or come upon them by chance. And yet some of them remain. We cannot always explain why. It does not necessarily depend on their beauty, on the grandeur of a monument or on the importance of their history. Sometimes it can be an empty street, a room, a door left ajar, a courtyard, a wall worn by time, a stretch of sea.
Something happened there. And that something continues to inhabit the place even when no one is left.
Perhaps this is one of the deepest forms of memory.
A place does not preserve only what we have seen. It preserves what we have felt.
When we return after many years to the house of our childhood, for example, we immediately recognise something that does not belong to the eyes alone. A window may have been replaced, a wall repainted, a piece of furniture moved. And yet we sense that beneath those changes a presence still exists.
Time has passed, but it has not erased everything.
Something remains.
It is this word, remains, that has long accompanied my painting.
For a long time I sought the human figure. I painted bodies, faces, gestures. Over time, however, I began to understand that absence too can have a body.
An empty chair tells of someone who has stood up.
An unmade bed tells of someone who has slept.
An open door tells of someone who has passed through.
A curtain moved by the wind tells of a presence we do not see.
A wall crossed by a blade of light can contain an entire story.
It is from this awareness that the Restanza is born for me: not the nostalgia of what is lost, but the trace of what continues to exist after the passing.
Places work like this too.
Portopalo, where I was born, is for me not only a geographical point in Sicily. It is the sea watched as a child, the island of Capo Passero, the departures, the men who worked, the voices that can no longer be heard today. Many things have changed. Some have disappeared.
And yet, when I return, something recognises me.
Perhaps we belong to places far more than we imagine.
We believe it is we who remember them, but sometimes it seems the opposite: it is they who remember us.
They wait for us.
A stone, a worn wall, the smell of the sea, a particular afternoon light can suddenly give us back a time we believed lost. In a few seconds people, words, silences return.
Memory does not proceed in a straight line.
It can remain hidden for fifty years and awaken before a window.
This is why some places are never forgotten.
Because they do not belong only to the past. They keep living within our present.
In my painting I seek precisely that moment: when what is no longer there becomes perceptible again without being represented.
I do not necessarily want to show who has passed.
I am interested in showing that someone has passed.
And above all what their passing has left behind.
Perhaps the sacred too begins here.
Not always from an evident image, but from the perception that in a space there exists something more than what we can see. A light that enters, a silence, a threshold, an emptiness can become spiritual places when they force us to stop.
Light, in particular, does not only illuminate.
It reveals.
It touches a wall and suddenly that wall seems to hold a time. It crosses an empty room and makes us perceive a presence. It falls on the sea and for a few instants reminds us how small we are before something that existed before us and will continue after us.
Perhaps this is why I paint.
To hold not the things, but their passing.
Because everything passes, but not everything disappears.
There are people who keep inhabiting a room after they have gone. There are voices that remain inside a house. There are seas we keep watching even when we are far away.