Projects: Play

I feel I should substitute the word “play” with that of “art”, or perhaps thinking about my work I would say “painting”, because really before ART became the most intrinsic word for the meanings we now give it, there was simply the term PAINTING.

Painting is in a certain sense a hangover from infancy, in which surrounded by colours and the smell of oil I feel that I am inside a world in which I rule alone, making up the unarguable rules for my tubes of paint and then generally broken by myself the moment I start a new project.

To play is to feel free to be exactly oneself. The memory of childhood games is the fantasy world, poised between parents and hideaways full of Martians, between school friends and shadows that transform themselves at night, or the creature that lives under one’s bed.
Beings too big to see or so small that they fitted inside the pocket of my school uniform. Tiny thinking figures, needing to be cared for. Typical female tendencies.

Thus scratching the surface soul, as if these yellowed photos were the sole proof of existence, where rounded figures have re-emerged that had lived inside my uniform and that I could not resist continuing to play with, as promises must be kept.

Soaked in oil colours and finally out of their secret hideaways they have become the object of my inspiration, for a fragment of infant games.

Ilaria Margutti