On Matter, Consciousness and the Origin of the Work

Your practice is often described as a “slow vocation,” as if your artistic identity emerged gradually rather than through early specialization. Do you recognize yourself in this definition?

I do not experience it as delay, but as necessity. What matters is not when one arrives at a language, but when that language becomes unavoidable. Painting becomes necessary when it is no longer expression, but structure — when it becomes a condition of being.

Your work crystallizes around fresco — an ancient medium — yet your practice is unmistakably contemporary. How do you explain this paradox?

Fresco was not chosen for historical, technical, or nostalgic reasons. It emerged from a conceptual meditation on the conditions of contemporary art. It is not an identity marker, but an instrument of thought.

In this sense, fresco functions as what Heidegger would call a site of disclosure — a place where truth happens, not as representation, but as unconcealment. The work does not illustrate meaning; it allows meaning to emerge.

This resonates strongly with Heidegger’s idea in The Origin of the Work of Art, where the artwork is not an object, but a field where world and earth enter into tension.

Exactly. The work is not a thing; it is an event. Matter is not passive support — it is active presence. Sand, lime, pigment are not materials to be used, but forces to be encountered.

Painting becomes a site where earth (material density) and world (meaning, structure, symbol) are held in productive tension.

And yet your work also resists the logic of reproducibility, circulation, and consumption that defines contemporary visual culture.

That is where Walter Benjamin becomes crucial. Mechanical reproduction dissolves aura, but it also dissolves presence. My work is not opposed to technology, but it resists disincarnation.

The work must preserve its presence — its material gravity, its temporal thickness, its experiential density. Not as nostalgia, but as ontological resistance to dematerialization.

So fresco becomes a counter-structure to the loss of aura Benjamin describes — not by romanticism, but by presence.

Yes. Presence, not nostalgia. Density, not memory. The work must create a condition of attention. It must slow perception, suspend cognition, and open a threshold of awareness.

The artwork does not transmit meaning — it structures perception.

Then the initial question — whether you are a slow vocation painter or the result of a long apprenticeship — becomes irrelevant.

Completely irrelevant. What matters is coherence, not chronology. The work is not an object of style, but a field of consciousness.

It is not representation, but structure. Not image, but condition. Not technique, but ontology.