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2005 No man's land
2004-05 Ruins
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2001 Figures
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1994-99 Bedrooms

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2004-05 Ruins
2001-03 Hiroshima
2001 Figures
1998-2000 Landscapes
1994-99 Bedrooms

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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

(extract)

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.