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09/19/2005: "Writing. Painting."
As I tidy up the studio now that the summer is coming quickly to an end, I find in a forgotten drawer notes and diary pages written many years ago. I open another drawer one with more recent letters. I take the letters and arrange them on the large desk standing by the window. Now the old and the new letters lie side by side! Next I make a broad selection, assemble some of the writings together and rewrite parts of them. Then I cut a lot and add a bit. So now let me see how it looks this copy and paste operation, an operation that in painting would have been quite difficult, not to say impossible.
I'm walking down the street. The face coming towards me (and that I'll soon be passing), has a color, shape and look that remains fixed in my mind. …. I seem to recognise people that I have never seen before, as if I had always carried them inside me. The people I meet are almost like a mirror that I never tire of looking at. However, my reflected figure is hazy and the silence that lies between myself and the people around me makes this image more mysterious. These chance meetings with other people in the street give me the same sensation every time. But perhaps it's enough just to look. Perhaps it's important to observe this mass of people moving around the city - this only too apparent and monotonous repetition. The city contains obvious meeting places: the cinema, subways, pavements, bars, pedestrian precincts; and there are equally obvious backgrounds: walls, posters, signs on the wall "no smoking", "exit" "entrance", "slow down"; and then there are the neon lights, the skyscrapers, the windows and, high up, little pieces of sky.
People seem to be caught in a net and their movements seem to fit into fixed patterns. Sometimes, it seems that only our private lives can fill the monotony of time; only our private behaviour can give meaning to our existence. Is this our destiny? Of course not. Perhaps this isn't everything. The strangest things fit together in life and there are small and great occasions to break the circle that surrounds us, and that we have constructed to defend ourselves and our lives. Sometimes a book, a picture, a newspaper, a gesture, made by one or a thousand people, is enough to make us ready to shake off all the habits that time has loaded onto our shoulders. So we still have to walk round the city; to look more carefully, to get to know it with our eyes wide open. On the walls I have seen the writing of peace and war. I have seen people running with banners in the sunshine (and I still remember other people running, while the sirens were blaring under an iron sky). I have seen women bending over their children and women making provocative gestures. In the city, everything gets mixed up. The sky sometimes looks like the eye of a young girl, wide open. Houses sometimes look like people and people sometimes seem to be lifeless. In some galleries I've seen abstract, "informal", nuclear paintings, looking like urinals, exhaust pipes, dirty, mouldy things - and there are people who look like those paintings.
Hollywood stars smile in the newspapers next to photographs of hanged men. On one page we find high society gossip with a furcoated lady and, on the next, tortured Iraqui prisoners.
Terribly different things happen in the world at the same time. In one room a woman and a man make love, in another a woman is murdered. And there are others that are even more incompatible: "Top level conference to be held before November", "G8 will meet in Europe", "Iran Rearmament", "Blair in New York" are the news headlines.
We have to observe, understand and be attentive. We mustn't laugh or cry too much.
This entangled skein of wool must have an end, even if many threads are knotted together. And in this mass there are always men walking, drinking, reading, watching and women with children, women showing their legs and dyeing their hair. The newspapers, the radio and the posters, the cinema and the television, the one-way streets and the subways keep people enclosed within the labyrinth of the city.
But I get the impression that behind all this there is someone laughing, someone who doesn't follow the rules - someone eating, drinking and smoking on his own with a great grin of satisfaction on his face. This someone has little white eyes and roams around the deserted city at night - the owner of everything, with his hands in his pockets, satisfied by what he sees. I get the impression that the man who passed me in the street this morning, smoothing his lips with his hand, doesn't walk on the zebra crossings, but crosses over wherever he wants, that he is the one who leaks alarming news stories to the press, that the prostitute waiting for a client is waiting for him. And I think that he was responsible for sacking the man who hanged himself in desperation. And I'm afraid he exists because I, too, have allowed him to exist. I'm afraid that this man has his roots somewhere inside me, and that he is also, in some way, a reflection of myself. Can all this be painted? Yes, perhaps. I think it can.
Alberto Sughi
www.albertosughi.com
