Boatto wrote: “a man has lost his woman… he is filled with emptiness”.
It is an emptiness to be painted, an emptiness which communicates. It speaks because painting has its own orality, its own voice, even its own intimacy.
I have read his most personal possessions with my own eyes: from the slippers to the bags, to the straw hats, to his fast bicycle: a collection of objects which I had never noticed in daily life, because they appear only in solitude, in abandonment… the weight of the evidence.
It is a wardrobe of affections, the paintings are letters waiting for Godot who will never come. But a painter must believe in the invisible.
The painter’s hands caress and re-touch the pompoms, red and superstitious.
The paintings are soft, they are not tragic. They are bright, because everyone has their own color within. My wife loved dresses; for her dressing was a way of being: subjective and intended as a “second skin”, like the brilliant white of her poise.
I have asked for nothing spectacular and nothing sensational. I have seen and remembered things of yesterday with the eyes of today.
Our partner’s possessions should be told and painted with shame and with the silence interwoven and infected by solitude.
There is, then, a re-discovered private sphere versus one that is globalized and public, a private realm guarded by painting.
Despite their silence, the paintings create an echo “filled with emptiness”, an intimate and hidden profoundness where I can take shelter.
I have always wanted to intrigue: in this cycle I wish only to make her memory float, to hand it down.