Back of the canvas, or what can be seen of My Little Plate and what happened / Left: natural light, Right: Artificial light
With the foolish mistake of a student at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, the painting of My Little Plate was whitened unbeknownst to me. It was part of a series “emotional still lives.”
Last spring I would make lists of things that I love: meaningful objects, like wheels, ribbons, boxes, the heartening loops of things, butterflies, the sun-being of citrus fruit. I wanted to express a sensation, an obsession or a sense of stopped time. For some reason I was secretly attached to that painting, for me so enigmatic, suspended in a condition of waiting by an empty little Plate, topped with grey and red tones.
My mind was preoccupied, so I left it unguarded outside the atelier where I work and found it the next day covered with a coat of white paint.
Besides anger, that ignorant act gave me the chance to face that instant, when two-dimensionality is split, or three-dimensionality is canceled in the fragile balance between things. When does one thing end and a new one begin? I painted abstract spaces, watching those forms, which by then, were only the memory of that annoying matter, disappearing. My little Plate is submerged like a heart, the smooth profile of its beat can only be seen slightly on the back of the canvas.
Carolina Pozzi (1994) lives and works in Venice, Italy.