Luciano Cesare Ascenzi

To paint (draw) and write well one needs to know how to observe. Painting and writing appear antithetical. But they become comparable in as much as they are activities that succeed through observation. To observe in order to understand, reproduce and describe. One observes in the way that the gull searches for its food in the sea. To observe is not to look, one observes with the mind in order to penetrate, to understand. Obviously the privileged organ of the painter is the eye, not the eye as an end in itself however, but the eye that has behind it a mind that reasons, that studies, that meditates upon that which it has before it to reach a profound comprehension and to be able to reproduce in an effective manner. The writer requires the same thing, but with a meaning that is even more abstract, by which I mean that the writer, in order to write must observe the world, life, so as to be able to write of the world, of life, in an effective manner, and to observe life is an abstraction, but it's brought about through the eyes, and behind these, the mind. Observing is a silent attitude, and for whoever wishes to draw or paint it must, by necessity, become an attitude.

What's an artist for? What's his (or her) utility to society? The artist appears to be absolutely useless in this society . . . that is, an individual that can't be pigeon-holed in any scheme, he (or she) isn't productive, the artist must be a crazy splinter that does the most damage possible to the conventions by which the productive social classes live . . . by which I mean the citizens who produce commodities, material goods, money . . . The artist (read, he who creates) must strip himself naked in the most complete sincerity, as in a soliloquy, addressing himself . . . he must make others (society) take a step forward, he must enrich the imagination, the spiritual life of others, make them reflect, scandalize. The artist is against. The artist must bring ideas that are stupefying, subversive, shattering, always new. He must not create with the idea of commercialising his interior life . . . the position that he occupies in the imaginary should be his pay, he must first of all speak to himself, teach himself . . . the utility that society derives from him is in fact in this total sincerity. Always, in every epoch, the truth has hurt . . . as the proverb says, "the tongue is deadlier than the sword" (read, ideas) . . . true. By artists (who create) I mean writers, philosophers, composers, painters . . . in short, whoever has new ideas . . . he must be a prophet of an unexpected truth . . .

I went to see Aline in Rome and we passed a whole day in conversation. In the morning, she, perhaps a little worried about spending a day with me without knowing what to do, without a precise goal, suggested to me to go and see the Picasso exhibition. I refused, saying, "I already know Picasso, I visited the Picasso Museum in Barcellona some time ago, and it's been a while since I've gone to exhibitions." Why am I taking up this theme? Because Aline knows my paintings, she's seen them, and she goes to exhibitions, she says. Aline reproached me for being too dramatic, for not being able to sublimate the subject we were discussing, and great artists always find a way to mediate between drama and the aesthetic, she said. Alright, I'm replying to you now Aline. "Aline, you went to see an exhibition of Picasso, and you didn't understand Picasso, the great anti-aesthetic or anti-graceful (as the Futurists said) revolution of the greatest artist of the century." After Picasso there's no more space for the beautiful, for the graceful, for the sublime. Up until him, there was the art of the great masters of the past, afterwards no, there was no longer the necessity. Art had worn itself out, lost its vigour, had become anaemic in that direction, it didn't have anything more to say, it was dead. Beyond the revolution of perspective, which served his idea of a non-sublime art, he painted with the sword of the bullfighter and the banderillas, and he tore his subjects to pieces, but he also painted with the surgeon's scalpels because he was one of the greatest draftsmen in the history of art in his highest moments, when he became untouchable (not in his blue or pink period, which are the more understandable to those who are unfamiliar with the topic, since they're easier and belong to the young Picasso).

It's preferable to paint portraits of people you know, at least a little, so that you can portray them truthfully. Resemblance isn't enough, it's not enough that the sitter can recognise him or herself in the painting, that they can recognise their features in the work. The portrait must be a portrait of the mind, or at least the portrait of certain of the model's psychological characteristics. The portrait painter must also depict the emotions and sentiments that the model evokes in him. How's this done? The eyes are the most important element, the eyes express all the sentiments, emotions and psychological situations that a human being can experience. For the artist, the trick is to depict them with slight accentuation, but without for a moment descending into caricature. This is why a painting can be a work of art, while a photograph cannot. Then comes the mouth. With the mouth you express the mood of the moment, and it must be perfectly attuned to the eyes. Whatever the eyes express, the mouth must express too, in the same manner, and with the same identical intensity. The hands are also very expressive, and they can reveal many hidden conditions, so much of the interior. All this is distorted according to the sensitivity of the artist because, as I've said, a work of art isn't a photograph of the model. The distorting lens that is the eye of the artist must dissect all these components and reassemble them in a perfect equilibrium.

Art has been, and by art I mean painting and sculpture, I was saying, art has been considered for centuries a means for recording. Painters and sculptors used it to document and illustrate everything they could, and everything that was useful to illustrate and document. For a long time painters and sculptors were considered in the same way as other workers, that is, as artisans, even if they were in some cases extremely able workers from the point of view of technique and invention and they were already artists in practice, even if they weren't seen as such. Michelangelo was the artist who made artists and painters take a qualitative leap and had them become and be recognised as artists, that is, as workers who were bearers of new ideas. The artist differentiates himself from others precisely for this: because he is a bearer of new ideas and the more the ideas are personal and original and the more they are considered as such by the general public, the greater the artist. Art, from a means for documenting reality, passed by way of Michelangelo and become an instrument for interpreting reality, and the more individual the interpretation of reality in art, the more it is effective. We've come a long way along this path in 5 centuries, to the point of cancelling reality with abstract art, and even after this the artist has always found for himself very personal points of view on reality, according to his own state of mind, his own feelings and his own ideas. Even if it seems ever more difficult as time passes to be innovative, ideas are infinite and there will always be something new to say in art, I imagine.

It's emotion that guides the hand when one traces a line or a mark. It's not the apprehension of certain contours of the model that guides the hand of the painter when he or she draws the line that corresponds to them. Rather it's the emotions, feelings, even the slightest, that the artist experiences when he or she looks that direct the hand of the painter. The hand of the artist is like a seismograph that registers every earth tremor, every movement, even the slightest (emotions, feelings) and marks them on the paper or the canvas. One needs to know how to observe in order to draw well, but it's the mind, the feelings of the artist, that interpret the model, and the hand is only the instrument that records these feelings. Even if it seems as if the hand, the gestures, have a memory. What I mean to say is that certain automatisms or the routine of certain gestures remain impressed in the manual practice, as if the hand had a memory of these repeated gestures and could then repeat them with greater ease and facility. For this, one has to work a great deal, to draw a lot, in order for there to be a fluent communication, in other words, the easiest communication, between the feelings and that which registers them (the hand).

Having seen my paintings, people with scarce competence and little sensitivity have said, 'you copy Andy Warhol', or 'you're inspired by Pop Art'. Nothing could be less accurate or further from the truth. Let me explain Pop Art; Pop Art reproduces the popular collective imagination and the consumption society, such as cartoon characters and supermarket goods for mass consumption, and Andy Warhol, in serigraph, which is a mechanical printing procedure, printed photographs that he himself had taken. He reproduced series of personalities from the popular collective imagination, maintaining in the work the whole range of chiaroscuro and points of maximum light and shadow, all be they coloured. I will omit describing my preceding phases - the academic phase of which few works have remained, the autobiographic, symbolic expressionist one, and the semi-mechanical one in which I portrayed my companions, the patients of the psychiatric hospital. I want to speak instead of the portraits that I do now, especially those of girls, which have led me to be accused of being a follower of Pop Art. My portraits are taken from real life. I need the model to pose for the drawing on the canvas. Then I apply the colour on the canvas from memory, I apply a colour that isn't realistic, but rather an emotional, psychological interpretation of the model. I apply the colour in flat fields with absolutely none of the academic apparatus of chiaroscuro. Moreover, as I work I give a great deal of definition to the eyes, having passed over all the rest, treating the variables in an economic way. I use this depth of the gaze (as I would call it) to give my interpretation of the character of the model, and in this way they become portraits that are symbolic psychological interpretations of the model, with the many technical liberties that I take, in other words, with an extreme economy in the technical means of expression. As you can see, this has nothing to do with the reproduction of mass consumer society, and I'd like to add that, as an artist, I'm no less than Andy Warhol. In fact, I'm more creative and more capable in the art of the painter. And that's all there is to it. Once and for all.

In the portrait, in painting, truth - by which I mean depth - is a necessity. What I want to say is that you shouldn't stop at the surface appearance. A simple physiognomical resemblance is not sufficient - that's a small thing for an artist. You have to grasp the most characteristic psychological and emotional characteristics of the sitter and render them in a portrait. Rembrandt, in the various phases of his life, painted an extraordinary series of self-portraits in which he laid himself completely bare. Rembrandt is perhaps the greatest in this field, that's to say the field of portraiture and self-portraiture. The self-portrait's a special case, perhaps it's easier to explore the depths of your own self, perhaps, I say perhaps because there are so few who succeed in this. In a portrait, in order to obtain greater depth, I trust to memory, that's to say, after having sketched the sitter on the canvas, I no longer have any need for the model. The coloured version comes later, when the sitter has gone. I apply the colours by memory, trusting my recollections, without the sitter in front of me, In this way I believe I depict something that goes beyond the resemblance which I have obtained in the drawing with the model before me, as well as the emotional and psychological characteristics which struck me most and which are sometimes projected by the sitter. Memory purifies whatever is superfluous and without influence: in memory, there settles the sediment of that which is strongest, essential, most characteristic.

Michelangelo marked the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of Mannerism. One could say that Michelangelo was the first mannerist artist. Michelangelo was an artist so great as to close an epoch gilded with the greatest of artists, artists of genius, and to start another in which no-one enjoyed his importance. The Renaissance was characterised by harmony, moderation, balance, the proportion of forms and also, I'd say, by a certain coldness. Mannerism, on the other hand, was characterised by an accentuation of the style of the artist, as one might say, in the manner of . . . with an elongation of bodies, a twisting of bodies and deformations. The characteristic that Michelangelo gives to his figures is that of a sense of the body. How can I put it? . . . Herculism . . . and uncomfortable . . . torsions. The figures in the sculpture and painting of the mature Michelangelo have this deformation which is a characteristic: manneristic deformation, stylisation. In Florence, in the Museum of the Accademia, there is the David. It attracts a vest number of people. Outside the museum every day there are absurdly long queues to see the David. All the other works are overlooked and glanced at distractedly by the visitors. But inside the Accademia there are also the statues of Michelangelo's Slaves, and these too are not admired sufficiently, like all the other works, apart from the David. This is a serious mistake, because to understand Michelangelo, the style of the mature Michelangelo, to understand Michelangelo's genius, one should consider the Slaves more than the David. The Slaves are more Michelangelo-esque than David, more manneristically stylised, in the manner of …

Paolo Uccello, a painter of the early Florentine Renaissance, is the most extravagant and singular painter of the entire Florentine Renaissance. Could one define Paolo, in certain senses, a gothic painter? Not for the canons that define the gothic style, but for the sensitivity of his spirit and for the final result of his iconography, especially that of his battles (Uffizzi, Louvre). I'll talk about the battle of San Romano (Uffizzi) which I've seen. It's a night scene of horsemen who seem to be jousting rather than battling ferociously, it's a scene of unreal colours, with a maniacal foreground perspective, with pieces of broken lances, and the lances and the bodies lying on the ground, laid out like orthogonal lines. They all seem to be the escape routes from a net or a chessboard, you can imagine it like that. But in the painting the perspective is from above, as if you were in flight, and then it's as if there were two perspectives, one for the foreground, and the other for the rest of the painting, that is, two points of view. But it's not this. The perspective and the plasticity or volume make these paintings wholly renaissance, while the unreality and the elegance of the horsemen and of the night scene make you think of court gothic, that is, of the sensitivity of gothic painting, I mean to say, of what it is that remains in one's mind and spirit after having seen a gothic painting, or a gothic sculpture.

I wanted to start a series of paintings inspired by the Bible. They were to be significantly different from all the paintings which had been done up to the present, they were to be unpitying as regards a certain sentimental treacle that religion has sticking to it, they were to be cruelly ironic but not blasphemous, they were to pillory a certain way of understanding 'good and goodness'. I didn't succeed in keeping to my project or, at least, I succeeded only in the first two paintings and then I got lost. Perhaps it's too difficult for me to face things over time with the same state of mind. I know that my mind, my emotions oscillate, oscillate in a short space of time, from one extreme to another, like a pendulum. I'm inconstant, I don't know how to maintain an emotion over time. I boast and I crucify myself in the same day. This happens at the emotive level, and my emotions are the motor of my creativity. For me, everything starts from my interior, at the visceral level. Perhaps it costs me too much energy to maintain a certain intensity over time, perhaps it's impossible for whoever, like me, creates from the inside. Perhaps it's for this reason that I've done only a few paintings in 12 years, because I've only painted when I was emotionally charged. I've never managed to do the work of a painter as if it were a job, that is, with continuity, every day.

From today I'll never touch a brush again - as far as I'm concerned, painting and art are dead. I've painted for 9 years, completely self-taught. In this time I've produced work that was original and never repetitive. My art evolved, as it should for every true artist. An evolution that is not only technical, but also aesthetic, always remaining tied, however, to the theme of the human figure (self portraits and portraits of psychotics). The affirmation and recognition given to my paintings doesn't have to do with their aesthetic value, but is linked to things and facts that have nothing to do with art. Whoever imposed this norm on me is insanely perverse and has extinguished in me all love for art and every stimulus to paint. I'm no longer a painter, now I work at the Co-op. I live alone and do thousands of things, I don't even have time to make myself dinner, now I live among people, I see people, and to see all the people I like and know, the week would have to be made up of 14 days, and the days of 48 hours and I would have to have a load of money and I don't have any money at all, so often I stay at home. I started to paint in order to leave a document of what I'd gone through, I sought to give form to my pain, I started to paint to fill my hopeless solitude while I was being treated in a psychiatric hospital. For 5 and a half years I've shared an apartment in via Cimabue with Pierluigi and I've succeeded, against all my hopes and expectations, to weave a countless series of friendships and acquaintances, so huge that I can't maintain it without the power of ubiquity. Then I was successful in painting in a way that was surprising, nobody expected that much from me, and my success surprised me too. I'll never know the real economic value of my paintings; now they're completely underestimated and if I were to make an obscene gesture, they'd be fought over and sold at who knows what price. My love for art cost me 2 and a half extremely hard years in prison and other very painful experiences. It would seem that I've wasted my time on this activity, it would seem that it's cost me too much without receiving anything in exchange. It's not true. A month ago I took part in a collective show, with a portrait I did of Pierluigi. Professor Bugatti looked at it admiringly and after observing it for a little time said, "it's a work of genius". This sincere critical comment recompensed me for everything and confirmed for me that when I started painting I wasn't foolishly ambitious. I knew that I could succeed in producing significant work. Now I'm through with it, through with it forever, and for reasons that have got nothing to do with art, I've had enough, now I've got other things to get on with.

No painter has depicted a woman as Gustav Klimt did, or at least a certain idea of woman, not the universal woman, but an aspect of woman. Gustav Klimt was probably lascivious, or in any case wasn't insensitive to the fascination of a woman if, when he died, 14 illegitimate children claimed his inheritance. Klimt painted mostly women, women as vampires, as serpents in the Garden of Eden, the dark side of humanity, lewd women, with burning eyes, moist, half open mouths, ill-treated women, in obscene poses, masturbating or copulating. Gustav Klimt knew how to render the female body's lustfulness and its power of seduction and temptation. Klimt lived in a civilization upon which the sun had set, a civilization that would be swept away by the First World War, which also marked the year of Klimt's death. Klimt lived in a decadent society, and he himself was decadent, just as his paintings are decadent and decorative. Like a woman his painting was dressed in thousands of sequins and trifles and, like a woman, his drawings and paintings are seductive.

Vermeer was an art dealer who dabbled in painting, yes, a Sunday painter in other words. I don't think he tried to sell a painting in his whole life. When he died, nobody knew him as a painter. Vermeer is a discovery of the 19th century, this great artist came to people's notice almost 2 centuries after his death. His paintings are as precious and rare as can be. In all, there remain very few of them. Vermeer is a painter of light. No artist, before or after, has succeeded in rendering light as he did. In Vermeer, the light is something like a golden powder which makes everything it touches precious. Like an impalpable liquid, which imparts the sense of silent and immobile nature. In Vermeer's paintings the light, the silence, the immobility, are characteristics that are more accentuated than in the paintings of other artists, characteristics that make them incomparable. His is an art of interiors, and the light is diffused like the aurora borealis, and everything is frozen in a polar silence.

Goya is a colossus of painting and my preferred painter in absolute, because his is an art of great moral value. His painting is a denunciation, the denunciation of the backward and violent country that was Spain between the 18th and 19th centuries. Goya painted the ferocious and violent popular fetes, where the manifestation of violence was gratuitous, a grounds for enjoyment and means to pass the time. Goya painted the violence of man upon man, and of men upon animals. Goya gave form to paintings and engravings that represent a Catholicism which, at the service of an inept and despotic monarchical power, oppressed and strangled the people, who lived this religion as a superstition. His observant eyes rendered grotesque, deformed and monstrous a humanity that was degraded and without hope. The suffering and desperation of Goya at living in a period when the sleep of reason gave life to monsters - which is also the title of one of his engravings - was made more acute by his deafness brought on through illness. Goya would leave this Spain where it had become intolerable for him to live, and would spend the last years of his life in France. Goya was not only a great painter and engraver, he was also a man of great moral stature. His mature painting and engravings (art that was both comprehensive and original) not only depict a society which he knew well, but also condemn it.

The painter paints his diversity, his alienation. He dips his brush in the deep red and black of his heart and his mind and, like Prometheus, brings fire to the people. My painting is subversion, an accusation, a denunciation of an injustice suffered, of a thousand abuses of power, it's looking inside myself, it's depicting myself naked, deformed, base, in order to assign guilt, guilt to those who reduced me to this. The poet, sets out, lays down lines of verse to tell of his solitude and his frustration, what he has not lived, but only dreamt, what he intensely wanted to live. Both of them speak of a Jew, of an ambiguous character. Nobody has understood, nor understands why he is ill, sick for a law that's sicker than him. My poetry is a stammer, the flight of a turkey towards the sun. It also speaks of me, of an invalid, a blind man, a lame man, it's a comic opera. My poetry is the work of an inexpert and lame acrobat, but it speaks of me, of someone who feels with great intensity that which he hasn't lived, it speaks of a clairvoyant who was blinded in order to sing.

Painters of drama are a category, a fine thread that runs through the centuries all the way down to us. There are latitudes in which it's easier to find great artists of this kind. They're found above all in Central Europe, and some in the North. The Germans have them in abundance. As early as the Renaissance there are great works by painters of drama. There come to my mind a crucifixion by Grünewald and a dead Christ by Holbein. But usually, for German painters, cosmic drama is the dimension of the soul. Dürer is the least afflicted by this: after a trip to Italy, he was contaminated by classicism and this watered him down. In Italy only one great artist reached these dionysian levels, and that was Caravaggio. He was an exception, perhaps because his life and his personality were so dramatic, to the point that he killed a man. And from his paintings it seems possible to understand that they were painted by a killer. Another great painter of drama was Goya, who all the better depicted deepest Spain, religion as superstition and suffocation, the ferocious popular fetes, the lack of freedom, the moral and material misery, when he had a personal reason for suffering, that is, when he became deaf. I've already spoken of the early Germans, and there's another, and that's Friedrich, romantic and dramatic. In the Netherlands, another great tragic and mad figure was Van Gogh. His countrysides seem to be blinded by a sun from another galaxy. Everything is hallucinated and full of dramatic sentiment and solitude. He would finish by taking his own life. Then I would include Edvard Munch, who was perhaps more ill than dramatic, maybe because he was born too far north. A difficult latitude for great artists. In this century, the greatest was Egon Shiele. In his life he went as far as to pose his sister nude and, also, to be sent to prison for carnal violence (not with his sister). His nudes, which have an almost wood-like quality, are outlined by a functional, nervous line and speak of a sick Eros. He would die very young of influenza.

Yesterday evening I went with Professor Bugatti, Director of the Porta Romana Institute of Art, and some other people to see an exhibition of abstract paintings, one of the best that I've seen recently in a private space. I shared my observations with the Professor, I said to him that they were very refined works, but that some slipped into affectation. The Professor replied that I'm too sectarian, because I only like a certain type of painting, one that's in tune with my own way of painting. However, he then added that he liked my paintings more, that my paintings are made with blood, sweat, tears and sperm, that my painting is full of strength, but not only, because if not, they wouldn't amount to much. They're also refined, because I manage to reach a synthesis. And this point about synthesis is a great compliment. I understood that he was saying that I'd achieved a difficult balance involving power, refinement and simplicity. This was the first major recognition that I'd received since I started painting. And coming from the Professor, a person who understands art like few others, fills me with satisfaction. The Professor had seen me paint portraits of my companions from the psychiatric hospital in his classes. I'd like to exhibit this series of paintings together in a show that I'd entitle "I crucify". I'm afraid that they'll be split up, sold a few at a time. Now that I've covered the walls of my house with some of these portraits, the others, as I paint them, I take to the Tinaia.

For me, colour is fever, delirium, affront. You can learn how to draw, with a good teacher you can become an excellent draughtsman: and the history of art is full of excellent draughtsmen, while there's a great lack of artists who stand out for their sensitivity to colour. Because, despite theories, more or less scientific, on the combination of colours, to put together two or more colours that feed off each other, that charge each other, is an intuitive act, instinctive in a way no theory can teach. For example, to combine a yellow and a blue of the same perfect tonality - and the tonalities of yellow and blue are infinite - so, that's to say, immediately find on the palette two tonalities that successfully blend themselves, is simply an innate quality that no teacher can impart. When I've a drawing that moves me, I energetically, quickly, throw down one colour after another, and the emotion I feel, when I combine the first brushstroke of colour with another colour, I'd compare to the emotion I think I'd feel if I were to attack a man with a knife, or to the gesture one makes to split, with a single axe-stroke, a big wooden log.

Up till now, we have admired paintings, studied the lines, the colours and the chiaroscuro. The lines could be descriptive, nervous, synthetic or like a whiplash, as in art nouveau or other styles. We then admired and studied the colours, which might be harmonious, contrasting or monochromatic. All these variables formed a painting. The viewers observed it and few of them understood it. In any case, the entirety was on a surface, which might be a canvas, a board or a sheet of paper. The fact that it was on a single plane made the image like a cinematic still, that's to say, immobile, not a sequence. In this way, we contented ourselves with seeing how an image was rendered. The gaze ran over the surface and the viewer was able to say, "look how well that head's done", "what a beautiful landscape" or "I don't like that abstract painting". Everything remained on the surface, everything was immobile and flat, despite the perspective. I gave depth and movement to painting. My icons unleash a conceptual and imaginative process like a sequence, and provoke emotions that must be the same as my own when I painted them. My images make you think, they're on a high conceptual level. They tell a story. They tell the story of my life. The life of someone different, of a hybrid creature, half Satan, half archangel. They give back to you what you did to me. My icons are my death, and they'll become your nightmare. They'll shock you, and you won't forget them. They'll enter into the shadow zone of your psyche. I painted them with my blood, with all my anger, they're my retaliation against you, pigs. The technical level of my paintings, of these first seven years, is uncouth, because I'm self-taught. But in any case they're effective, functional with respect to their purpose: they'll strangle you. For a few months I've been taking painting lessons from Professor Bugatti and my technique's gradually improving. Now I paint portraits of my former companions in the asylum. They're all people that tormented me in one way or another. Apart from a few women. I tell their story in my paintings, with all my wickedness, with rancour, it's my revenge.

Yesterday I came across a catalogue for a show, by a painter called Vaccarezza, or Vaccareccia. He was offering us portraits of guests in a psychiatric hospital. Crazy people in other words. This pseudo painter depicted caricatures of human beings, perhaps thinking in this way to represent the interior disorder and insupportable pain. This painter, like many people, doesn't realise that the caricature of man is a monkey, not a madman. The madman has altered features, altered as if he had a mask, the dignified mask of those who suffer. From time to time it happens to me that I have a night of fog in my head, because of the medicines, while at other times I feel like a blade, a blade that slits the throat, a blade that penetrates the flank. My appearance, perhaps meek and harmless, my gaze lost in space, my speech both low and slow, has maybe taken many people in, and so they've thought they could make mincemeat of me, but they've ended up getting it in the throat, like a fishhook. Perhaps they thought I was beaten, but I'm not a loser. Far from it. They've shut me up in horrible places, but I've left by the front door, with my own keys. I've been left unscathed by experiences that would have destroyed anyone else.

Today I had a new experience; I went to Lucca to see an exhibition, where two of my self-portraits were on show. One depicted me with an enormous mosquito biting my neck: I painted it thinking of Montelupo, where the mosquitoes were the worst torment for almost ten months a year, and there was no defence against them. So much so that if a mosquito bites me now, it evokes for me that terribly hard period of reclusion. The work isn't well painted, it seems clumsy to me, painted by an inexpert hand. I only managed to render the gaze, which expresses a deaf torment, intense, amplified by the continuity with which it was repeated, continually. In other works I've done a better job. I find that insect truly repellent. The other depicts me sitting at a table with a large book in front of me, a cigarette in my hand and, nearby, a woman. This was the girl with whom I was in love for so many years, and I never declared my love to her because I didn't have the courage, and perhaps for this reason it was never returned. My impotence aggravated my illness and my suffering. Now I ask myself whether anyone who sees these two paintings understands the life experience I went through to be able to paint them. Can one see a life of suffering? Can pain be sold? It seemed to me I was naked before the people who looked at these two strung-up scraps of meat. It's truly a strange business. The self-portrait was sold almost immediately to a couple who had previously bought four other paintings from me. I went over to them and they seemed like two sensitive and intelligent people. Perhaps the painting's in the right hands.

I was assigned a destiny of solitude and humiliation and I didn't understand the reason. And I transformed my prison into an ivory tower, lined with books. To know and understand, to become a painter, was the sole reason of my life. I applied myself to reading. Every theme interested me, and I roved from astronomy to gastronomy, but the history of art interested me above all, to the point that they let me take up painting. I started with very clean, very meticulous, technically refined paintings that were almost all copies, still lives of the great masters. I then moved on to portraits and, eventually, to self-portraits. At that point I found myself drawn into a mire, unable to clean myself of a sticky mud. I discovered a vessel out of which rose demons and monsters. I painted the wounds that had been inflicted upon me and which still bled. It was like practising exorcisms and casting out spirits in an attempt to reach insensibility. I'd been so close to death for so long that it had become my companion. I realised that horror and the morbid had a strange power of fascination. The canvas was the mirror of my fall into a night so deep, into a vast void of human values and I portrayed myself so low and wretched and I rose up out of it so powerfully and saw a new day of glances made tender by human kindness.

I plunged the brush into my wounds to render the inexpressible, the breathlessness, a disintegrating anxiety, fear. When things went well for me at the psychiatric hospital they were tough characters, otherwise, they were scornful, full of derisive laughter and insults, they didn't stop short of blows at the psychiatric hospital. I've sought to paint the cold breath of death that accompanied me in the secure institutions in which I've been shut up. Pellicanò*, after having seen some of my paintings, said to me that I succeed in rendering my emotions. I've brought about a revolution, until now painters have painted what was in front of them and they depicted this in a manner that was more or less neutral, or they worked from imagination towards a high aesthetic, but without searching inside themselves, in their own past, themes upon which to work. To render my life, the alienation and death, has been a painful and difficult task. I've found many reasons to paint a life of difference, a life that was a winding and shadowy path, a side road that never joined the Highway for the Sun that was the life of everyone else. Why did I start painting at 40 years of age? Because when I was a very small child, I was 5 or 6, I tried to draw a portrait of my dad, and I received a lot of compliments in return. From that point I assumed I was a good artist and I lived with this conviction up to the moment when I took up this activity, that is, at 40, as I said. It turned out to be a good thing for me to have an instrument with which to leave documents giving my point of view of the things I'd done and what the punishment was. Perhaps my paintings don't have artistic value, but are only a pathology for images, but that doesn't matter. At this point I don't feel like an artist, and in any case I don't like artists and I don't know what to do with the honours given to artists. I don't produce pleasant things to decorate the world, what sense is there in trying to refine the drawing rooms of the good bourgeoisie? The world is frightening, and for this reason you need to be truthful and brutal, just as I have been with my self portraits, with myself.

My project was to paint my life, a life that was different, ingenious in its wickedness, and depict it in a brutal way, in other words, how I lived it. An anti-aesthetic. While all artists seek to paint works for the drawing room or the salon, my wish would be to place my paintings in the Psychiatric Hospital, that little city of pain shut in by high walls, where the people who have spent a large part of their life completely forgotten, practically buried, accustomed to pain, would feel represented and understood, but not consoled. My intention is not to console or sweeten, mine is an anti-aesthetic of nausea and disgust. For this reason I scarcely sell any paintings. And I could paint graceful bunches of flowers or the most charming Madonnas to put above the bed, but instead I paint images for which the most suitable place, from the point of view of well-thinking people, who understand virtually nothing of a work, would be the cellar. But I'm not discouraged. I say there's a great need to bring beauty to a barbarous world, there's a great need to mystify, to create charming, reassuring images for philistines to put in the oases that are their beautiful houses. But there's even greater need for sincerity, for lucidity, to tell things the way they are, to open people's eyes, even if this isn't appreciated. To impose with my paintings, paintings that represent my life, to have painted them despite everything and in spite of everyone, in order to leave a document of my hell, of what I've undergone, of what I've suffered to make them, has been a hard battle. Pain-filled white heat. I did it, and now I'm satisfied. I don't wish success as an artist, I'd lose contact with my reality, and wouldn't know who I was any more. The paintings are more important. They remain. Fashionable artists come and go.

I'd like to share an evening with you, Vincent. I like your feverish painting, I understand your torment, your desolate life. We are linked through madness and through having sought in painting that which art can't give, something that is a substitute for real life, relationships, the love that we missed. We failed in everything that we undertook to do and so we reinvented ourselves as painters, you at the age of twenty-seven years and me at forty, out of desperation. Until you blew your existence in half with a pistol shot. You couldn't bear the pain and what you'd understood: that art is a solitary exercise, that we're alone with our torment in front of the canvas. I also arrived at the same conclusion, that art can't take the place of the most important things in life, feelings of affection. I resisted, perhaps because my protective bark was thicker, I entered into a war that was already lost from the start, I withstood the frightening absence of human relations, until, surprisingly and unexpectedly, I emerged from a situation that had never given any indication that it would change. Now when I paint I'm aware that art is only an activity, that it can't fill a void left by love, even if it's considered to be one of the products of the spirit. I know things that you couldn't know - one of the paintings that you gave as a present was used as the door to a hen house. Now, to see your paintings, people form enormous processions for the most exhaustive show ever organised about you, tickets have to be booked months in advance. Your art is an object of cult and your paintings are the most sought after and expensive on the market. For me, your paintings have more value than all the others, because I see them as tormented, they're splendid icons which emerge from the darkness of reason, painted with a brush plunged in your ribcage, dripping blood. Vincent, your work is magnificent.

It seems so difficult to understand why a drawing or a painting is a work of art to observe and how, as if with a blow from a sword that cuts to the bone of the question, to decipher the profound intelligence of the work. Why a collection of sketched out lines end up by joining together, like the web of a spider, that great craftsman, into the wonderful whole that is a successful work, while a thousand others fail. To know how to weigh up a work, compare, understand the difference between one picture and another, seems as difficult as asking an innumerate to solve a mathematical equation. To understand on my own has been a great challenge for me, so much so that I've ruined my good eyesight over books and worn out my shoes visiting every single gallery in Florence, untiring. But, having read and observed so much, I reached a further level of intelligence and lucidity when I attempted to turn to practice, albeit without any teacher, completely self-taught. Now I know how difficult it is, among the infinite possibilities, to hit upon the coordinates that bring into being the magic of the successful work.

I want to express what I used to feel when I painted in the middle of the night, after having stared at the blank canvas on the easel for two hours, and having, in those two hours, smoked a packet of cigarettes and drunk a triple espresso. This was about taking the pain test, about finding out how sensitive I was to suffering. Sometimes I was overwhelmed, the space of the canvas was an oceanic abyss into which I was plunging. I sought the state of mind and the feelings that had taken me into prison and into the asylum. In a feverish state, with my heart in my mouth, I gave form to the nightmare of my past, painting self-portraits for which I paid with my blood and my nerves. I ran off one after the other, I've painted more than seventy. I believe that I've described in an exhaustive manner my contorted spirit, my torment. This lasted almost three years. To bear witness to the agonising misfortune, to what had happened to me, to what they'd done to me, was a psychological necessity. I think that nobody's paid the price that I've paid in order to paint. These days, in the middle of the night I sleep. I sleep those few hours that allow me to confront the day in an acceptable manner, and I paint much less. But what counts most is that I don't paint my past any longer, these days life seems light to me, and even the effort is sweet now. Now I paint portraits of people I care about or whom I respect and I give them away as gifts. Now everything seems easy to me.

At the Night School for the Arts, I had a run-in with the life drawing teacher. I explained my point of view to her and she explained hers to me: "Look at that drawing, he's been working on it for months, yours certainly isn't finished", and I replied, "For me the drawing isn't an end, a finished design isn't what I'm looking for, rather I use the drawing in relation to a painting, for me a drawing is a tool, a drawing is useful to me for the painting", and she said, "This is a school, we draw in this way, this is what we learn here." I tried to explain, "I'm not interested in perfecting a drawing until it's exhausted, for my needs my drawing's already finished as it is." The other students said to me, "You already know how to do that stuff, but if you carry on like this you won't learn anything else, you'll only do the things you already know", and I replied, "I come here to loosen my hand and the drawings I do are enough to finish a painting, which is what I set out to do. I'm only interested in the exactness, not the finish." In short, bad vibes.

Of all my young friends, Claudio is the most talented, the most gifted, not only because he excels in his studies in the Faculty of Arts. Everyone 30 and a single 27, and moreover, he holds down a regular job. But Claudio has talent in life, he lives like a young artist, in other words, he spreads talent in many fields of everyday life. I love him and admire him, just as I love and admire many other young people, in the various worlds that I pass through every day. Including the world of work in Pizza Okey. But Claudio has more talent than the others and I love him and admire him more than the others. When I speak of love I mean a deep friendship, virile, and without any sexual attraction. Claudio and I have many exchanges of opinions and ideas on the themes of literature, art, music and, naturally, women. Claudio, before an art history exam for which he got 27 and all the others 30, said to me "The Fauves are French expressionists". It might seem like that, but it's not. There's a substantial difference between the two artistic movements, a difference of thickness, to my mind, they aren't even similar. In Fauvism, the violent colours are an end. The end is to produce a strong impact with colours that are almost always pure, unmixed, without intermediate tones. And the end is always an aesthetic of beauty, violent but beautiful, all on the surface level. In Expressionism the colours, these too almost always brilliant and pure, are a means. When the expressionist painter painted, he was making first and foremost a social criticism of customs and of the individual in the Germany of the time. The expressionist painter portrayed the monkey concealed under appearances, the deformed being, by digging deep down. They were fine minds these painters. Great artists, even if they were missing the divine painter, the greatest artist, their Matisse, or at least, one can make out the divine painter in Schiele, but he died before his thirtieth birthday. Too early, even if he did leave us paintings of an unforgettable, stunning and painful beauty and force.

Of the painters born in my country, Caravaggio is my favourite. Caravaggio is an anti-classical painter, the first truly modern painter, with a truly modern aesthetic. From certain points of view he could pass as a contemporary painter. Caravaggio was a violent man, just as his painting is violent, painting which, in his mature period, seems to be set in a cellar. In certain works, such as 'Ecce Homo', he even seems to be expressionist. Modern painting starts with Caravaggio, if we take modern to mean an aesthetic that is 'anti-graceful'. The works of such greats as Botticelli, Raphael and their good company consist of figures of women and madonnas full of compunction and devotion. They are too tied to an aesthetic of beauty, too sweet, too gracious, bound to a conception of ideal beauty which has its starting point in the classical Greek world, rather than the Roman one. In the statues that have come down to us from the classical world (Greco-Roman), we can see that the Romans sought to render their subjects in a realistic and natural way, while the Greeks idealised their subjects. The Renaissance took as its model the idealized Greek world. In Italy, the first painter who differentiated himself from the ideal of beauty was Caravaggio, and he did so in an extremely original way. With slashes of light that cleave the shadows and capture the figures represented at the climax, the most expressive point of a movement, of an action, and these figures are never beautiful in a classical sense, but rather in an expressionist one.