ARTIST STATEMENT
I turn my energy inward to explore the effects of loss consequential to my father’s death. The overhanging palm fronds were selected from the last pile he trimmed off the cycad plants in our home garden in Italy, right before he suddenly passed away. Out from the pile I selected around 50 leaves, treated them, painted them, and stored them in his car to drying. I later shipped them to my studio in Los Angeles. I then integrated the leaves as an extension of the thick and sharp scar like lines I had previously painted onto the burnt wooden tryptic my father saw completed a month before he passed.
When in 2020 I installed the piece in the theatrical black setting, the work was introverted, fragile, and intimate. It reflected the inner pain from losing my father and it echoed my wounds. In its 2022 display inhabiting the white gallery space at Bermudez Projects, the work suddenly gains strength, and becomes a testimony of stepping from a feeling of absence to the one of presence. Here, it rises above the ashes.