"For “Quelli che Restano”, I thought of a project directly inspired by an old Soft Cell song from the 1980s, Tainted Love.
One day, while I was driving, I heard this song on the radio. When the song ended, the radio host improvised as a translator and translated the title as “L'amore Tinteggiato” (Painted Love). Intrigued by the term (I found the idea of a “painted” love very stimulating at the time, as it seemed very close, as a definition, to the love story I was pursuing at the time), when I got home, I looked up the lyrics and realized that yes, it was indeed about a “painted” love, or rather a ‘facade’ of love, but in reality, “tainted” means rotten, spoiled.
It often happens that mistakes—mine or others'—are the basis for many of my works. So, from that misinterpretation of the title, intrigued by the lyrics that I felt were really relevant to the moment I was experiencing and finally inspired by the beautiful video of the song, in which the stars come to life and take the form of dancers who invite the boy to run away from home, abandoning his ‘spoiled love’, this work was born, which, with extreme simplicity, uses the phosphorescent adhesive stars that are usually used in children's rooms.
A vast landscape of birch trees is redrawn on the walls of the room—prepared for the occasion—using thousands of phosphorescent stars*, visible only in the dark, which reveals not only the outlines of the forest but also those of two figures within it.
A mechanical device specially connected to the electricity supply alternates one minute of darkness with one minute of light, charging the stars with brightness and revealing, with the light, a subtle pencil drawing that would otherwise be invisible, a drawing that completes the installation by revealing the reasons for this “painted love.”"
Andrea Mastrovito in Quelli che restano's exhibition catalogue.
*Actually, the work was finally done with phosphorescent paint instead of the self-adhesive stars.