art diary #22 - Reverence for silence

In Munich I had the opportunity to visit a life-changing exhibition at the Museum Brandhorst: Five Friends. Musician John Cage, visual artists Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and visual artist Robert Rauschenberg in their brilliant collaborations in life and in art.

One of the many narratives that puzzled me along the show was silence. Part of the queer community, the five artists often inhabited silence, the spaces in-between words, lines and notes, as it was illegal to be queer back in the 50s.

As a very loud person myself, living in a loud world, at first I did not comprehend how crucial is this dimension in art, silence.

A few days later, back at the studio in Sicily where everything makes sense through work - I felt a real reverence for silence. I was standing in front of the empty canvas, asking myself what is silence in painting… and I felt an enormous respect and the weight of that void space.

Speaking to musicians on that theme, puzzled me ever further. Is silence in painting the absence of the human gesture? Or is it the negatives in space? What if my most silent moments are the fragments of time when I am applying the brushtroke, the mark, and it disrupts the emptness of the canvas? In a real struggle, I cut-out parts of the original canvas and mounted it in various parts of these four paintings, looking for silence outside whilst I am yet to find it inside.

This series is therefore emerging as notes on silence and presence, paintings as mechanisms that enable me to explore the most difficult questions about silence in time and space, through gestures that bring silence to my mind to inhabit, even if only for seconds, offering some relief from the noise of my own thoughts.