Via Francesco Viganò, 4, 20124 Milan, Italy
Marco Belfiore
Alighiero Boetti (Ramo Collection)
Marco Belfiore answers questions from
Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, curator of the Collezione Ramo
What is your relationship with drawing and Italian art history of the last century?
Drawing is a very powerful language that is born before the word and continues where the word fails. When I have nothing to say the paper remains blank and ideas get stuck in the pencil, but when everything gets unblocked a process of transformation of ideas starts that transforms me as well: a drawing becomes an animation, which inspires me with a musical composition that in turn suggests ideas for a liveset or a new drawing that will cause me to question myself before drawing again.
The history of Italian art for me is also a very long journey in the evolution of drawing through various epochs; drawing today means continuing this journey, but more generally I think it is always a great opportunity to renew oneself and not get stuck between the drawings of the past.
Why did you choose this work by Alighiero Boetti?
Because it is a work that I was not familiar with and that gave me the feeling of using a type of irony that is very familiar to me: an irony that is faux-playful and seemingly disengaged but used to talk about issues that have never been resolved that concern, in this case, the mystery of our identities. The fact that on a "funny" drawing depicting everyday objects one can merge ancestral but very current issues seems to me yet another demonstration of how with a simple mark on paper one can go beyond words and undo time.