First: Don’t Turn Out the Light

Carolina:            In this picture we only see little girls, some dancing and others sitting elegantly. They are surrounded by delicate flowers. The pink background and their white clothes stand out. A delicate way of living in the world...

Chiara:            ... one that reminds me of fairy tales and of a time and space that, even though arriving from far in the past, is so much a part of us as to involve us. The time of infancy, of once upon a time. Your little girls in this picture echo this and then everything comes back and circles inside this other time, sparking off something that we recognise at once and that only then do we realise we were looking for.

Your picture’s strength lies in reminding us that fables are nearer to us and more important than we think. It is as though you wanted to say: give more time and space to fairytales, let’s recuperate imagination which, in our society, has been eliminated from man’s ‘high’ awareness as too rudimental, uncritical, and infantile. In fact imagination establishes a relationship between objects and, of course, is the source of every judgement. If we think about it, once it has finished the brief period of childhood, imagination wanders off and leaves in its place rigid, rational control. And today where is the place for imagination in the world? Everything is known and catalogued, we can no longer imagine an object outside this logic.

Carolina:            The child who amazingly creates the exploit of an actor, man, soldier, acrobat. This is something banal that, however, represents imagination about reality. It is where painting enters life. The world becomes colours, forms, subjects.

I ask children to be my collaborators. When I am near them I see their way of looking. And this interests me.

A fairytale archetype corresponds to each person. It’s true, and this seems to me to be so right that we can see it when we note the resemblance between people and the characters of a fairytale. The spoilt little girl seems to have her equivalent in the princess who was too delicate to bear the discomfort of a pea under a hundred mattresses. Or else the brave and enterprising girl who walks through ‘ the forest of the city’ in order to visit her grandmother, as in Little Red Riding Hood. ‘The Frog Prince is an unbearable snob, he looks down with dewy eyes on the princess and can only hope she frees him from the enchantment’. (1) So fairytales have a lot to teach us and seem to be able to give us real awareness.

Second: A Fantastic War

Carolina:            This picture shows a group of children playing at war. It is a battle between children with coloured toy weapons: two children are about to fight. All this comes from a book which I think I’ve already spoken to you about: Sabotaggio d’amore by Natalie Nothomb, which is about eternal themes like love, friendship, hate and war; and then there’s another book, I ragazzi della via Pal by Ference Molnar.

My idea was to show the experience of children with today’s heavy reality. I don’t think that fighting, for example, is anachronistic nowadays. Reality means geography, biology, television news reports, race, soldiers, religion, bombs, catastrophes, terrorists... What does all this mean for children? And so there comes a moment when you must invent a game: the ‘fantastic war’ (this might well be the title of my picture) in a desolate, deserted landscape, with coloured weapons....

Chiara:            It’s true that your children are fighting a coloured war, but it is inevitable that we become aware that children, in reality, ‘play’ at real war. Children in our ‘civilised’ world actually do take up real arms and they die too. War does not spare children but, perhaps, they might help us. You Carolina, are convinced of this, so much so that you ask children for an answer and then narrate it on canvas: it would be better to fight war with coloured weapons... War has always existed and probably today we know rather more about it because technologically we have gone further, even though only partially, into situations that were previously unknown: how often do we think that war is a game between political, economical and religious powers?

But art history, perhaps out of a sense of diffidence, has never shown children who bear arms, either toys or real ones. We have to arrive at the last century to find a long list or, at least, many images of children photographed or portrayed bearing weapons, metaphors of our cruel and violent times.

Your painting reminded me of a series of disturbing watercolours by Henry Darger in the show The Disasters of War where his works were shown together with Goya’s prints and Chapman’s photographs. Darger’s watercolours had a greater impact on me than all the other works, perhaps because the protagonists were boys and girls. Through highly coloured baroque drawings the artist shows the violent events of the wars between the Vivian Girls of the ‘reign of unreality’ and other surreal characters from religious fanatics. Darger’s work is interesting because it shows how war ought to exist in the collective psyche, i.e. where the innocent are innocent and the bad are horrible and undoubtedly wicked. What attracts me in his phantasmagoric enactment of children at war is its naive character together with its dark and grotesque fascination. In his case, as perhaps in yours, children enter into war to fight an unreal and metaphorical combat. Another artist who has use toys weapons to construct a huge installation ‘against war’ is Chris Burden. In this work there are at least two possible interpretations: the one we would like and the one that actually is. A war that it would be preferable to fight  with ‘toys’ and the admonition that, increasingly in modern history, war has become the ‘game’ of the powerful.

In this sense, art has continued to reason about this violence and to condemn it. Deep down the artist is the person who has no fear of showing the uncertainties  that humanity feels with regard to existence, to coming out into the open, to making a gesture, to loving and expressing any other feelings... and even less of showing the precarious state that we feel today, the sudden destruction that might be our lot from one moment to another.

Your children, by inventing their war-game with coloured weapons know that today it is important to know when to stop, there at the frontier where reality can be suspended and unresolved, not yet revealed in all its horror and beauty.

Third Conversation: Chinese Shadows

Carolina:            There are Chinese shadows here. They are children who, with their hands, try to create shadows, some of fearful things (such as the devil) and others of animals. At first I thought of projecting them continually on the wall. Then I thought of huge pictures with just the image of the shadow painted. At last they were changed into images of children trying to create these forms with their hands. I think I have arrived at the best solution.

Chiara:            The space of the pictures you are showing is now more rarefied and abstract. You even paint shadows. When I was thinking of the show you will be having in Verona there came to mind what Julio Cortàzar wrote about the fantastic: ‘...There is a moment in which we wish to be ourselves and unsuspecting, ourselves at the moment in which the door, that before and after had only been the front door, slowly closes and allows us to see the field in which the unicorn whinnies’. (2)

Above all I like the beginning of this quotation when he says, ‘There is a moment in which’, the moment when we manage to see beyond, the moment when dreams arrive. The moment of the rarefied atmosphere of this picture where the children’s gestures are projected on the walls and the Chinese shadows become strange shapes of animals and monstrous figures. .. leading us far away... where we have no trouble in hearing, on that wall, the unicorn whinnying. Here the gesture made by the child is so minimal as to be hardly recognisable. We perceive it only through the shadow projected on the wall; the colour is almost absent, once more paring away in order to arrive at what remains: a strong and dense silence like the shadow we see.

Carolina:            There is a part of reality that I’m interested in, even if I find this dimension through memory, something eminently literary... a glimpse rather than a mirror of the world. Something halfway between what is hidden and what is in view, between personal memory and painterly memory, the personal and the collective. Only a few things are necessary: delicate colours, diluted surfaces, clarity and simplicity. To economise seems to me to be the way to go beyond.

Chiara:            The artist’s activity is that of knowing how to find another way to consume reality through his own marks and to rehabilitate something within the existing order. Borges wrote: ‘Reality needs no other reality in order to have meaning’ (3) only a window is opened through which we manage to see something else.

By way of very simple gestures your children take us back to where we came from and give memory back to an atrophied awareness. I’m also interested in this journey towards the freedom necessary for humanity’s  vitality. A world in which a being attempts to withdraw itself from the dispersion and velocity of rigid contemporary existence.

Fourth: Forget-me-not

Chiara:            Around the figures of the children there is an empty space, or rather: the figures seem to emerge and float in a white space, isolated from everything surrounding them. A privileged niche protected from the rest of reality. The return to childhood seems  one of your basic themes. In fact childhood has a particular way of elaborating reality: it makes a myth of it. A child looks at things and transforms them, gives them meaning, wraps them in images; and these images, these ‘meanings’ remain in the memory like a kind of personal mythology... like the hidden meaning of things that will live on. This, I think, is the terrain evoked by your work. Poetry in images: it allows the emergence of those myths that lie beyond the banal surface of things and endows them with further meanings because they have deep, ancient roots.

You describe realistically the gestures and the poses of your little protagonists, while the language of your painting is deeply symbolic and can take us to archetypical places.

Carolina:            In Non-ti-scordar-di-me, Forget-me-not, I have painted the face of a little girl with these flowers on her head like a hairpin. It is an image seen through a kaleidoscope that is multiplied and forms a circular image of itself. I was fascinated by the idea that the series of images turned back in the memory. I ask them to make me remember how an image can be distorted and how to represent it in colours and forms.

Chiara:          ... they are images that move, they walk about in your memory once you see them and make you return to your infancy. I think that the mythical, the universal, things common to everyone, are rooted in our childhood. In your infancy you elaborate a sense that remains unique, because in that moment you see innocently, purely, penetratingly. Going back is always a nostalgic experience that evokes loss. In  childhood we experience moments of truth that are then irremediably lost, and each time we go back we relive and search for this sense of loss.

Carolina:            The very act of painting leads me back to childhood and this link is very strong in me. It lets you paint life like an epopee: glorious facts. I hope that the children I paint have a relationship with the world in their eyes.

Chiara:          Often your images lead me to that point where what is visionary becomes mixed with daily reality. You isolate certain gestures most of which are childlike: the most dear and familiar. And you isolate them and emphasise them by painting them in this rarefied and almost abstract manner. You redraw them and make them seem to be outside the time of history. This is because you have always been fascinated by what lies behind daily life, by what unexpectedly manages to make an appearance by breaking down the confines of existence.

Carolina:            A mirage, but not a definitive break. A re-creation because I think it is a question of creating yourself afresh. Every feeling tends to shows itself: on the face, through gestures, the voice, posture. I am fascinated by the universe of gestures. Blushing, for example, as a characteristic expression of mankind, one that appears suddenly just when it is not wanted. To blow up a balloon that disappears into the skies. Putting out your tongue, trying to play a melody, to be amazed: these are minimal tales in a highly concentrated time. Momentum. In the brief film Bambino prodigio, a child composes, with imperceptible movements, the music that he is playing on the flute. He breaks off during the rhythm of a song and waves goodbye. In another animated film there is simply a child who sticks out his tongue. I liked the idea of animating a ‘raspberry’.

Chiara:            Your children’s games, their raspberries and questioning or astonished looks, their arguments and tiny vanities, make us all undertake an extraordinary journey through our memories. A sketchy gesture hinted at on the canvas is enough to spark off sensations and allow the emotions to burst out. It always seems as though what we do not see has a basic importance and, at the same time, is able to overturn viewpoints and accept the unexpected.

Carolina:            ... a minimal gesture is enough to make a relationship with the world.