Meditating on the words conveyed by Angela Vettese during her interview on the equivocation of expressiveness, I once again reflected on my way of expressing myself through art. In particular, I revisited the work Abulia, which I had previously created for the Interius exhibition. On that occasion, I sought to communicate my inner sense of unease by representing my seated figure. I felt it was essential to ask myself why I needed to depict the external physical body in order to express an internal condition. Yet, representing the physical interior also felt distant from the intimate emotional sphere.
As Pirandello suggested in One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, we tend to draw sharp lines to define ourselves, so much so that when our thoughts or actions deviate from what we consider conceivable or acceptable, we define them as ‘outside of us’. When in fact, it may be precisely these deviations that lie deepest within us—an inner, hidden reality not dictated by moral constructs or conventional associations, but solely by who we are.
We are composed of a spectrum of infinite possibilities that we begin to discover and either accept or reject as we grow. It should not surprise us, then, that following certain experiences—or even spontaneously—we might act differently from how we thought ourselves to be just moments before. Of what we might be, we know only a fraction.
I find the Freudian concept of the unconscious particularly fascinating—not so much its manifestation in dreams and their interpretation, but rather the free observation of gesture, which in my case is realised through mark-making. I find that movement still has the power to break free from reductive social constructs, to be freer than language or figurative imagery, which are already bound to established associations.
How does one express a spectrum of infinite possibilities?
Like everyone else, I certainly do not possess the tools to know or represent an infinite spectrum, but I can access a part of it. To do so, I have relied on the technique of automatic drawing: lines and marks created without the intervention of consciousness or the ‘judge’s eye’. By removing the limitations imposed by visual canons, I was able to discover what instinctive action can produce—not only in its repetitiveness, but also in its unpredictability.
I therefore chose this technique to create a white panel on which I worked with black markers, excluding colour, as it already carries multiple layers of imagery that can hinder free interpretation. I then enclosed the work inside a black box that conceals this ‘portion of the inner spectrum’. It becomes visible only through small openings covered by transparent plastic discs, which reveal the hidden interior solely through the viewer’s active engagement.
Just as understanding a person requires interaction, so too must the viewer interact with the work in order to grasp its essence. Through this dynamic, I aim to make the viewer realise that, just as in our relationships with others—and sometimes with ourselves—not everything is readily accessible. What we can see is rarely available all at once; it requires a process of exploration and reconstruction, one that demands an attentive and conscious gaze.
