My Dear Evangelina...

Venice, 14 January 2021

My dear Evangelina, how nice it was to open the door to the postman today and be surprised by this envelope containing the portrait of your mother.

Since I sent you my letter about 6 months ago, many things have changed and finding myself in front of your colours now, especially the detail at the centre of the picture of the hands crossed on your mother's lap, helps me return to another image of hands that would otherwise have been too painful to cross again.

I never told you, but during the last years of my mother's life I took a picture of my hand touching hers every day for 217 days. We had decided in that strange period of her illness to do something that would hold us together.

My mother somehow wished to participate in my daily expression and I wanted to bring her there, inside, with me.

My obsessive attitude to accumulate everything, to never let go of anything I care about, has led me to hold back this gesture each time we met.

I know that you will understand what I am about to tell you because I know this is what you also do to always bring out those bold, present and resolute colours with such conviction.

In giving ample breath to each individual colour to make it live as if it were an entity in its own right and at the same time make it coexist with another or others.

I could say that what we do day after day in our studies is to create the conditions for things to happen, letting them flow in a simple, free and continuous evolution.

Perhaps what interests us is not knowing that what we create is unique and unrepeatable. Perhaps what interests us is not so much to feel exclusive and original.

But what does not make us feel alone is knowing that what we do has already been done by others before us, that others pursue it at the same time as us and that others will do so after us.

Now, to return to your hands or better to the hands of your mother, what they jogged in my mind is precisely the act of recollection with oneself that precedes that of the encounter, the natural and necessary one of keeping bottled up and then opening up and extending again towards others.

Thank you for that white-pink, that black-brown, that teal and that red, that red that frames and holds the whole gesture together.

I embrace you in anticipation of seeing you again soon and resuming our conversations on painting over a good glass like we always used to.

Yours, Maria