2001-2003 Hiroshima Project

“ Hiroshima ” is about thirty meters long and two and a half meters high. It's an enormous puzzle made up of 220 assembled parts. The project consisted of two distinct phases: “breaking up” and “reassembling”. In the first phase the exhibition of the work is followed by the sale of dissociated parts of the puzzle. The idea is that people can buy a part of the painting during the exhibition, therefore letting empty spaces appear in the work until it is progressively deleted. In this way I try to illustrate, or better, to make the mechanism of memory and oblivion tangible. The second part of the exhibition, which will take place in an unspecified number of years, will be dedicated to the reconstruction of the work.

[...] Each one is a depository for an individual experience, represented by a part of the painting, which for however small the abstract entity drawn from a figurative work, represents being part of the event. By reconstructing the work I intend to underline the need to feed memory and to assert that in the face of tragic events in history what counts above all is solidarity, the need to get people to agree in order to reach something constructive.
Therefore the project stages a metaphorical and ritualistic representation of man's destructive actions together with the possibility of reconstruction through memory.

[...] Chaos is an ambivalent concept in which the representation of destruction and the possibility of reconstruction coexist, it is the moment in which life and death meet. The end and the beginning are confused in chaos; I feel I put the observer face to face with a choice; he has the possibility of interpreting the image in an optimistic way or not.

Hiroshima Art Project, 2001-03, oil on paper, 30mx2,5m, exhibition at Padiglione Cornaro, Padua, Italy

Hiroshima Art Project, 2001-03, oil on paper, 30mx2,5m, exhibition at Padiglione Cornaro, Padua, Italy

Hiroshima Art Project, 2001-03, oil on paper, 30mx2,5m, installation at Padiglione Cornaro, Padua, Italy