on paper

Contingency enters even the most rigorous composition. It is hidden behind each single movement of the hand. Painters are constantly faced with surprise. If, while they are painting, a drop falls onto the sheet, they do not rule out they might use it. In any case, they have to deal with it, whether they erase it or draw it.

A drawing is made simply of the lines sketched, the observer should not complete it by referring to what it depicts. Fixing a shape is something that happens in your memory. A painting is a representation in the plural form.

Memory already holds any image the eye, by seeing, simply has to retrieve. Through this time variation, the shape is processed and, once finished, it separates from us and does no longer belong to us. So, the only right to possession lies in the originality of the seed we have inside etc. The life of a painting starts when the painter’s life disappears…

Valerio Adami

(from “Thoughts of a Lake Painter”, in the catalogue “Flavio de Marco. Stella” at Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna in Rome, 2014)

"Ein Abend im Botanischen Garten", by Berlin Factory, 2017

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