Curator/s: Roberto Dulio, Massimo Ferrari, Claudia Tinazzi

For the past 20 years, in almost all my works, I have set my stories in an urban landscape, which I build with wood and cardboard and then photograph. Compared to my early works in which the maniacal attention to detail made the representation almost perfectly real, with time I have preferred to simplify every gesture. I lay my light cardboard buildings with drawn windows on a table, and that is enough for me.

In both cases it is a representation of an undefined city, an ideal city of mine in colour and form, although I know that deep down it has always been Milan that has inspired me. What appears in this book is a ‘real’ city, a ‘real’ Milan. It is so in the position of the buildings and in their shapes.

I start with a photograph I take with my mobile phone, print it out and then with a small brush and a few colours I begin to eliminate everything that gets in the way of my thinking. It is interesting how quickly a different place appears, almost like a theatre set suspended between the raising of the curtain and the beginning of the performance.

I seem to be walking through a city late at night, but with a light that illuminates it, an eclipse in reverse. For me, Milan is a city drawn in the sky by hundreds of cables and wires that cross each other, run parallel, chase each other, spin. Besides creating an abstract projection of the city, these cables hold the buildings together like motionless puppets.
A large scissor could cut one of these cables and everything would collapse.

Milan occupies all the spaces above and on the horizon every space is filled. There are no empty spaces in which to imagine something else.