I discovered in detail the work of Giorgio Morandi in 2006. At the time, I was living in Bologna and 2006 is also the year I began to develop my own pictorial language. I remember being taken aback by the experience of seeing Morandi’s paintings as I could not understand to which period they belonged. I felt that his paintings were completely timeless despite the fact that time itself is one of their central themes.
Over the years, my artistic work has slowly evolved and at the same time, I have also been able to discover points of contact between the work of Giorgio Morandi and my own, even beyond the marked meditative character of both.
While Morandi’s painting takes us back in time using space, what I try to do in my work is to present space from time. The duo space-time with its two different perspectives that converge to the same point are undoubtedly the central axis and the core of this exhibition.
Strong conceptual similarities also become formal similarities if we look in detail at Giorgio Morandi’s graphic work. When we look closely at his engravings, we see that the objects they represent are formed by thousands of parallel lines executed with great precision and a very particular poetry.
Starting from the analysis of his graphic work, I made a series of paintings in formats similar to those used by Giorgio Morandi and which, like his engravings, are made of an endless number of lines.
While thinking about the common points of Morandi’s graphic work and his paintings I created some practically white paintings that refer to a ghostly image or to a kind of white shadow, silent, like Giorgio Morandi’s painting.
Joan Saló, Berlin, Summer 2017.