On painting
Interview in Paris on February 26 and 27, 2005
by Philippe Villaume and Pascal Bordenave
Translation from French to English by Jacquelyn White  

Pascal Bordenave: Mauro Bordin, is your work as a painter the result of a calling?
Mauro Bordin: Probably, yes...As a child I drew a lot, but at the time I was more interested in becoming a cartoonist. It was when I was a teenager at high school specializing in art and I started studying academic drawing that I began to become more interested in painting. I was mostly attracted by technique: I liked drawing and painting. But I feel it was only after having finished my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts that I decided to work as a painter because I felt I had something to say even though I still didn't know how to express it. I think it all started the moment I stopped asking myself what I wanted to paint. I looked around and it was then that I started to paint my room. It was the beginning of the adventure; it was about me, of course, but I feel it was a good starting point.

P. B.: But why did you only paint bedrooms and not other places?
M.B.: The bedroom is a place where we experience the fundamental moments of life, such as birth, death, love, and where we spend a good part of our time; the bed therefore becomes a depository for traces of our existence. At the same time it's a closed space. At the time, two books in particular, Oblomov by Goncarov and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevski, caught my imagination. In the latter there is a character, Raskolnikov, who is almost always in bed, unable to do anything. His bedroom is like a nest, which welcomes and protects him, like a mother's lap… But it is also a trap, a prison, in that it stops him from getting out in the world and facing reality.

P. B.: Is there an autobiographical element in your choice of theme?
M. B.: Yes and no. There is certainly a part of me which would like to stay in bed, to not have to leave my room... nevertheless I'm quite active and I'm not afraid of the life outside it or of confronting others; on the contrary, I feel I look for and need them. But there is always a kind of angst and uneasiness that I have tried to give shape to through these paintings.

P. B.: A series of recurring objects, for example the table lamp, the window and the armchair, can be noted in your bedrooms. Is any precise meaning given to them?
M. B.: The bed and the objects surrounding it are part of daily life. It's true that the bedroom is the most intimate room of the house, a theater for our subconscious where our dreams and most intimate meetings take place. I have always wanted to use as few objects as possible to make my message clearer. I was interested in giving a testimony of this life through visible traces, for example books, clothes lying around, etc. At the same time I tried to make passages and transitions stand out, for example through the windows. Light penetrating a window makes it look almost like a luminous sign marking the presence of the outside world in the most intimate place in the home, but metaphorically speaking it symbolizes the conscious meeting the subconscious.

P. B.: I get the impression that there has been a progressive change in your approach to painting from your works in this period. You start from an essentially naturalistic and descriptive point of view and then move in the direction of something I see as more metaphorical and symbolic …
M. B.: At the beginning I painted my bedroom and those of people I was close to and I was probably satisfied with a simple representation of reality. Then I started defining better elements more loaded with connotation and introducing them into the paintings. Little by little I refined my canvases and layered the pictorial subjects to enable the sedimentation of traces to express itself. Therefore I enriched the paintings with colors and layers, always with the aim of animating the subject in mind. In the series of bedrooms, which I was dedicated to for five years, the phases of this evolution are clearly visible. The last paintings represent, with only a few exceptions, only the bed. I consider them to be transitional works in that they present formal and chromatic elements that I explored more deeply in the next series of landscapes. For example, the sheets on the bed evoke the waves of the sea... The idea of associating the bed with the sea and consequently sleeping and dreaming with traveling, being shipwrecked, was born during pictorial practice. I have always searched for movement in my paintings, in the case of the bed I never wanted it to be made or tidy, rather I tried to reproduce a bed that has been used, where someone has slept.

P. B.: The gradual transition to abstraction makes your themes less and less “recognizable”, nevertheless you continue to give your works titles which are tied to reality, such as “ Green room” or “Table lamp”. How do you explain this?
M. B.: My attachment to reality simply corresponds to my desire to remain tied to something that can be narrated . I'm not very interested in abstraction per se as it easily results in a purely formal study. Painting offers us the chance to tell stories; I don't see why we should deprive ourselves of that.
In my opinion the title isn't so important, the theme can be recognized immediately, it's an immediate given of the work. As far as the works you have just mentioned are concerned, they are definitely far from reality because they are part of the last rooms I painted. In the last period of this series the rooms are repeated, they're places where I slept, lived and painted many times. By painting them again and again, I wanted the images to come out of the magma of the painting on their own, like evocations from memory, which weren't completely defined by a precise, stereotypical drawing, but which remained in an open space one could get lost in.  

P. B.: Renato Valerio writes that the “bedrooms” are “fragments of a vision of the entire universe and not pictorial pretexts” which remain isolated. Is it correct to say that what you're interested in is not so much the object as the vision of the world it suggests?
M. B.: Yes, and I believe it is always like this: an artist always suggests a particular vision of the world.  

P. B.: ...an artist who successfully finishes his or her work?
M. B.: It doesn't matter much if it is successfully finished or not. I have always worked on series because first of all I wanted to tell stories, stories which have been inspired by my personal experiences, but which represent a more shared experience, which anyone can see themselves in.

P. B.: Mauro, 1998-99 is the year you break away... You decide to “knock down” the walls of your room and explore landscapes. Or better, precise elements of the landscape, like the sea, the mountains, a tree. Why this change?
M. B.: I worked exclusively on bedrooms for five years and I felt I had sufficiently explored this theme. So I wanted to make an important change, abandoning a subject which is quite structured from the points of view of perspective and the approach of the spatial element in order to dedicate myself to natural and traditional subjects, in which perspective is reduced to a binary structure: subject/background. I put man aside so I could concentrate on elements in nature that have inspired him. Working on these subjects really fascinated me in that they are found in all civilizations, starting from the most ancient, with a similar symbolic value. Mountains, for example, are tied to the idea of man meeting god; it's in the Bible, obviously, but it makes me also think about the pyramids in Egypt, Mount Fuji in Japan, the Maya ...All people have had sacred mountains or constructions that reproduce the shape of a mountain. Places where hermits withdraw to meet god, to become wise.

P. B.: Trees, mountains... there's a recurrence of vertical elements: do you give them a precise meaning?
M. B.: I only show the top of my mountains and trees, the point where the sky and earth meet, an axis mundi. What I wanted to show through this series of paintings is the conflict between our earthly, material dimension and the need for transcendence, spirituality, and I feel a vertical element is an adequate subject to represent this.

P. B.: Among your paintings, “Starry sky” seems to me to be the most radical in that it's the painting which distances itself the most from representational points of reference. What motivations pushed you to create this nocturnal scene and how are you tied to the tradition of nocturnal scenes in art? Is there perhaps some relation to mannerism that you often refer to?
M. B.: Mannerism, and in particular Veneto artists such as Titian and Tintoretto, which I studied in depth, has always been a point of reference for me. One of the most interesting elements of mannerism, in my opinion, is the theatrical staging that enables the observer to be “placed” in the painting; this principle has always inspired me.
As far as “Starry sky” is concerned, I painted it with the exact intention of creating a “contemplative” work which one can reflect and get lost in.

P. B.: In general, what is your relationship with pictorial tradition and different genres?
M. B.: I'm tied to them by affection and recognition. I believe comparing oneself to great artists is always an enticing challenge and in a way everyone does it in one form or another. I have never come close to different genres to follow the paths of other artists for the reason that they crossed mine. There are many artists who I have learned from, some from the past such as Tintoretto and Titian, who I've already mentioned, but also Goya and Rembrandt. I could cite Soutine, Sironi, Kiefer among 19th century painters… Soutine, in particular, is definitely my favorite from that period.

P. B.: Mauro, the crucifixion theme is a pictorial genre in itself that some contemporary artists continue to explore today. How would you define your personal approach to the subject?
M. B.: I have always been attracted by this theme, on one hand because of its moral implications and on the other because it enables me to confront “art history”. What I'm mainly interested in is the discussion of the different and misunderstood individual who is martyred because of his diversity. Christ on the cross is an emblem of the forsaken man, alone, unjustly condemned by his people. A man who does not accept the laws of his society and who consequently is not able to find his place in it. But he is also an individual with an enormous amount of energy, ready to sacrifice his life in the name of his ideas.

P. B.: Could a parallel be drawn between the figure of Christ and that of the artist, a person who is different and a little marginal with respect to society?
M. B.: It's possibile. It's true that the figure of Christ is that of a subversive individual, yet at the same time creative, an artist could legitimately see himself in that figure...
In a way, as in the series depicting the mountains and the trees, Christ on the crucifix is a symbol. Many people have a crucifix in their homes, but how many people think it's a representation of a dead man when they look at it? Christ represents the physical dimension, man, meeting the divine dimension. The crucifixion is the passage from life to death and for Christians from the earthly dimension to the heavenly one. I believe it's not a coincidence that this event takes place on a mountain.
If there's a limit to this series of paintings it's that the subject lacks some shades of meaning without it really lending itself to being treated differently. The crucifixion is tragedy, solitude, sadness. In my opinion Christ on the cross is also a mirror of our body that falls apart, that gets old. Let's say I tried to give shape to this moment and make it eternal.

P. B.: Mauro, your painting dedicated to Hiroshima after the bombing is a work that is truly enormous, almost 30 meters in length. When did your start this painting?
M. B.: I started in 2001 and I finished it in 2003, with a few pauses in between. It's a work that I wrote a project for, it's not “only” a painting... I wanted to create a truly spectacular exhibition to pay homage to large-scale human tragedy.
“ 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.

P. B.: But it will have to be an incomplete reconstruction...
M. B.: Definitely incomplete but emblematic of memory that is erased. Some parts will probably be damaged, others lost forever... But this is part of the mechanism of collective memory. 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.

P. B.: A new dimension can be seen in this work compared to your previous one: a stand is taken towards the history of humanity.
M. B.: That's right. I started working on “ Hiroshima ” at the time of the war in Afghanistan , but I didn't want to create a work directly tied to this country. I preferred working on a past tragedy that implicitly enabled me to express my disagreement with events taking place in the present. I was born in 1970 and I grew up in a country that taught us to reject war. But it seems things are different today. For this reason I felt the need to speak about it, to throw light on the present by showing the past and in a way, to exorcize it.

P. B.: What did working on such an unusually sized painting give you?
M. B.: For the first time in my career I worked on a painting that was too big to be seen in its entirety, so in a way I felt like the buyer who would have only seen a piece of the work in his house. Therefore I had to work on it by imagining the final result. I only saw it intact when it was first shown in Padua in 2003. Until that moment I had no idea what the outcome would have been. I was forced to not concentrate too much on detail and to always keep the whole of the work in mind.

P. B.: How did “ Hiroshima ” make your painting evolve?
M. B.: First of all, compared to the previous series of crucifixes, it is a more “optimistic” work, even if that seems like a paradox. Hiroshima is a very delicate subject, I was afraid of speaking about something I didn't know, since I hadn't experienced it. In my opinion it's important for an artist who has never experienced the tragedy of war to commemorate and at the same time to give a message of hope. I tried to make this clear through the choice of color; this element represents energy that circulates, life that counterbalances death. In reality, the choice of using many colors to paint the ruins is an idea I got from a passage of Se questo è un uomo by Primo Levi, which describes the sun setting on a concentration camp. The contrast between the beauty of the sky and the absolute squalor of Auschwitz perfectly underlines the total indifference of nature to human tragedies, contrary to an “expressionist” approach, which consists of representing the participation of nature, an approach I wanted to avoid.  

P. B.: After “ Hiroshima ” you continued to concentrate on the theme of ruins. Why?
M. B.: I continued the work that I had started with “ Hiroshima ” and therefore I created a series of paintings on Dresden . Both cities are emblematic of destructive folly: Hiroshima was a city devastated by the first atomic bomb, while Dresden , which was bombarded by the allied forces in '45, was a city full of art, not necessarily a military objective. Then I did some paintings on Warsaw , Caen and other cities destroyed during the Second World War.
After “ Hiroshima ” I had the desire to make paintings with a more “accessible” size, representative of the streets cluttered with debris, which suggest a journey through the ruins, while “ Hiroshima ” aims at representing an entire landscape, 360 degrees. In both cases, however, I was interested in showing human folly, its infinite power of devastation. My work as an artist also consists of giving shape to absurdity and chaos.

P. B.: What attracted you to the idea of giving shape to chaos?
M. B.: 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; in my paintings chaos is represented by the ruins, therefore by images of destruction, but it's exactly here where life will begin again. 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. In this way having put the streets close up is emblematic of this choice. Contrary to what I had done in the series of crucifixes, I tried to make the images in these paintings ambiguous enough to enable a double interpretation.

P. B.: If it's mountains, seas or bombarded cities you work a lot starting from photographs …
M. B.: Photographs which document an event are really a starting point, and for this reason I always try to find black and white photos, usually photocopies from books. I never use color photographs because I prefer to interpret the colors myself; the photographs are used to capture a certain atmosphere, to place guidelines for the formal construction of the painting, nothing else.

P. B.: In conclusion, looking at your work, in particular the ruins, I get the impression at times that the subject of the painting is only a “pretext” for the pictorial work, that it disappears behind the same material of the painting. Do you agree?
M. B.: Yes, but I think this always happens and it's like that for all artists in my opinion, because it's the painting that gives life to the subject. The subject is a formal idea; it's the interpretation that gives value to the work, not the intention. At the moment I'm working a lot on material: I create a certain thickness on the canvas thanks to different layers of paint, I use a lot of colors, I'm looking for movement, but this has always been tied to the idea of the stratification of the traces of time.
From a technical point of view I almost never know in advance what the result will be, and besides, this is what I like about painting: the painting is created day by day, moment by moment, and varies according to your mood.