Qu. A painter like you has to start with technique. How do your pictures come about? A. I started with abstraction. The human figure was always there, but in the beginning only I saw it, as it were. Then I arrived at defining the figure more clearly. I like studying the drawing a lot, and to do this I use a crayon of the sort used for glass, which dissolves well in turpentine. But this phase is preceded by the preparation of the canvas. I choose special canvases, sometimes used for furnishing, that are already coloured or have a printed motif. At heart, I have a baroque taste. On these, I apply some coloured pigments, according to the portrait I have in mind. Then I dirty the canvas further using highly diluted oil paints. Only then do I start to draw. The black graphite melts in contact with the turpentine, and creates dark patches. Other coloured patches rise up from beneath, slowly, from the areas coloured at the outset. And finally, I lay on other vertical strips of colour using a builder’s trowel. I like to make all these layers run.
Sometimes instead, I paint on panels, and then have them lacquered gloss by a company in Brianza.

Qu. What, what? You send it out to a subsidiary?A. Well, yes… Then recently I began using a completely different technique for small-format portraits: I do it all in one go using a spatula, without even a drawing.

Qu. Who are the girls in your paintings?A. The obvious answer, “pretty girls”, is not right. They have to be girls who do something for me, and who are basically “normal”. If the sitter conveys a special feeling to me, the work is already done. Of course, the effort of the actual production then depends on a lot of factors. At times, I use academy models, and everything moves much faster. But often I paint girls I have met by chance, and naturally it takes more than one sitting to break the ice.

QU. In other words, they’re all real people. What do you look for in them?A. I am trying to catalogue my generation. Or rather, no, that’s not right: I want to catalogue my years. It’s like making a film about these girls… the dripping vertical strip of colour we spoke of earlier results from the fact that I consider these canvases in a cinemato-graphic way, and I like to imagine the vertical movement of the film stock.
I consider the people, of course, and I never do portraits in settings. I work in series: I began with teenagers, and painted the way they dress, stand and move.
I stopped when I realised they were devastating my studio (he laughs). No… the truth is I was tired of their “innocence”. The “Love me tender” series portrays the look of decidedly more adult girls, while a later series in “urban culture” style zooms in on tattoos, piercing, punk crests and hoodies. A mixed period followed, the result of a sentimental crisis, and now I paint in pink.

Qu. A desire for tenderness?A. Precisely. 

4 April 2008