Michele Bolzoni

I have always considered my paintings as children … and as every painter I have always been very jealous. I found myself painting sights, landscapes, people etc. and then covering the finished paintings with a cloth and hiding them in the darkest and most hidden corner of my lab. In the beginning, perhaps, the satisfaction was a lot, but looking at them after a while left me indifferent. I found them there as I had left them, sterile, inert, dead.

Everything changed when I found out to become a father … Month after month I saw this creature growing in mother’s womb, hidden from the world, secretly and then I reflected. That was the vitality I wanted to find in my paintings. But how to reproduce it?

The idea came to me by looking at a painting made by Cimabue. It is a work done with experimental techniques: the white lead, blended with oxygen-filled materials had oxidized and then optic white had become black and instead the black carbonates had been whitened. The yield is that of a negative painting. I thought how good it would have been to see him grow over the years and escape the author’s control.

Then I studied the oxidation of metallic materials. Indeed the paintings changed over time through processes of slow combustion and therefore destruction of matter. The colors that could be created over time were easily definable: from copper to green, from iron to red and brown, from lead to white and so on.