Two young fish were swimming along when they met an older fish swimming in the opposite direction; the older fish nodded at them and said, “Good morning. How’s the water?” The two young fish kept swimming; eventually, one of them looked at the other and said, “What the hell is water?” (David Foster Wallace)

We often stop being aware of the most obvious realities and fail to notice what the water we live in actually is.

In the water in which I move, there is a fundamental reality: the fact that people go to a museum or a gallery with the simple intention of contemplating a painting or a sculpture. To me, this seems like a remarkable phenomenon… and if it is my own exhibition, this magic always amazes me and fills me with deep gratitude.

Surely, to move and to evoke sensations is the only aim—and always the main aim—of any work of art and of the impulse that art exerts on people. This is the only explanation for why contemplation, solely for the purpose of an aesthetic sensory reward, is a reality that we must not take for granted and that we must value as a privilege of being human.

On the other hand, I understand that the life of a painting begins when it is exhibited; when a work confronts new gazes, that is when its own biography and transcendence truly begin. The success of its survival will depend on analysis, explanation, criticism… but above all on the emotion it provokes in the viewer.

And so, now it is time to present my work, and it is up to you, in your role as active observers, to enter the game. The acceptance or rejection, the success or failure of the works I present here no longer depends on me; the work is displayed and “launched” into its own history through the feeling of new interpretations.