Rome, August 1981

Description

An original piece from the series “Memories paper”; oil and pencil on paper; 30 x 21 cm, 1999. Original sold

My father, when young, was fond of photography. He loved to develop the images on his own. A rudimentary darkroom was set up in a closet, where he experienced the effects of developing baths on the portraits of his children. These photographs, along with other photos of memories of grandparents, pictures of the period of the war, the marriage of my parents or my and my sister childhood, all of the summer holidays, and countless other occasions to remember, they are still part of the baggage of memories of my family, kept in an old cabinet.  Their appeal lies in the irregularities, in the imperfections, in the grains of dust that soiled the film, in the overexposure burning the edges and merging all the objects in an indistinct white light, in the color fading due to the passage of time. I like to think that the paper possesses its own selective memory, which unveils some elements of the image while hides or removes others, staining only parts of the scene, while the rest is left in the second floor, in black and white. Or I like to think that the fading paper misses parts of that memory, and sometimes what remains seems not to be the most important thing.