Mandalas

Mandalas is a series of works where I tried to address the relationship between the impermanence of all things in the world, a Buddhist philosophical concept very present in Eastern philosophy and the very Western desire for its opposite, namely permanence, understood as the possession of a certain object.

This, most likely, is due to the fact that here in the West we try to perpetuate our presence on earth by offering some form of resistance to the bugaboo of transience, the ultimate quality of the human race.

I created drawings, some large, which exaggerated the measured and rigorous gesture of the Tibetan Buddhist monks in creating their mandalas. Gestures, mine, obsessively repetitive and very dilated over time. The technique used is varied but always linked to the drawing: graphite, ink, colored pencil, used on paper or canvas.

Once the work was finished I violently threw a certain amount of paint onto the surface of the support, creating a strong contrast between the time taken to create the work and its immediate destruction through that gesture.

On the other hand, even those monks, once their work, which is conceptually very spiritual, is finished, firmly rub their arm against the finely decorated surface, erasing every trace of the newly created harmony.