Boleòn

They call me Boleòn. Little is known about me, and that is a choice. In fame I see a weight I do not want to carry into my private life. Boleòn is the alias that identifies me and protects me at the same time, a name that allows me to feel free from my true identity and to express myself in my most authentic form.

The beginning

I was once asked how I know when a work is finished. A simple question, one I had never asked myself, and it turned out to be more important than it seemed. Of a work I do not see the end — I see the moment it is born. I bring it to life and then I let it go, at the mercy of events, waiting for the day it surrounds itself with a frame that does it justice. And I do not mean only the physical one. Sometimes the frame of a painting is its very value, and it is right there, in that outline also made of history, that the work comes to life after the artist has generated it. Over all of this, often, I have no control. I do not know which events will pass through it, nor which gazes will end up transforming it.

I think of the Mona Lisa. It is not the most famous painting in the world because it is the most precise or the most perfect; it is famous for the frame that has grown around it, made of the one who painted it and of everything that has happened to it. Before 1911 it was not even the most celebrated work in the Louvre. Then someone stole it, and for two years the empty wall drew more visitors than the painting itself had ever attracted. When it returned to its place, it was already legend. Fame, after all, does not always spring from the quality or the value of an object in itself, but from everything that wraps around it, from tangible matter and from all the intangible that lives around it. The boundary between work and frame thus blurs into an infinity of dimensions.

And like a father with his children, I let my works wander the universe and find, sooner or later, the frame that can render them honour and grace. I hope that among those who look there is someone capable of giving life, starting from what I have created, to a new frame, a new story, perhaps even a new work. Because we are only human, and none of us can raise a wall alone. However immense each person's effort may be, only together can something truly great be built. I too am a man like many others, and I trustingly offer my small brick of thoughts and feelings. Everything, measured against the infinite, is nothing. It is up to me to decide how high to look and how hard to strive, knowing that what I do will remain tiny before the vastness of the cosmos and of human affairs. And yet I firmly believe in the importance of every single brick, every single gesture, every single breath. To this I devote myself entirely, so that someone, after me, may pick up that brick and keep building.

Spaces and colours

In my watercolours, white is not an absence. It is a freedom, and therefore also a responsibility — the one I hand over to whoever observes. To the background I entrust the meaning of a frequency to be transmitted, a held note that accompanies everything that settles upon it, and I translate it into monochrome, or nearly monochrome, colours. Right now, among them all, white is the one that returns most often, because it is the space that grants the most air, the most silence, and allows a concept to expand in every direction.

The circle

In my paintings, dots, spheres and semicircular shapes keep returning. They hold perfection and imperfection together, and this is the paradox of the circle. Pi, almost the DNA of every circle, is a number without end and without return, the portrait of something that appears perfect yet hides within itself a tangle of imperfections that never finds balance. And yet it is precisely the circle that gives the painting its balance, that joins the figures to their meanings like a bridge bearing the weight of several worlds holding each other up, while its position, never truly precise, lets its ambiguities show through.

The lines

My lines are designed to offer the eye no rest, right where it would usually find a safe harbour. In a line we instinctively look for a beginning and an end. Discovering that sometimes neither exists pushes us to ask bigger questions, to chase what cannot be seen, to go beyond the usual meanings of everyday life, towards what remains beyond time, direction and the ordinary.

Go beyond the title

The titles of my works tell what I see at first glance, but often they are only a threshold. They serve to open a wider reflection, to pause, to listen to one's own sensations until one identifies with what is depicted, or with what each person interprets and creates with their own imagination. "Shooting star over the night sea", for example, is an open work. We can feel like the star that ends its journey by burning out and, in doing so, destroys what it touches. We can feel like the sea that warms and senses something new, or like the creatures that inhabit it, that die, that will be born or will feed thanks to that light. After all, for better or for worse, we are all children of the stars, and it is up to us to choose from which side to observe and interpret the work, according to the mood, the perceptions and the sensations that inhabit us.