Fondazione La Rocca

What does it mean to forget?
For Matteo Fato, a painting is finished when… you’ve forgotten it.
But forgetting doesn’t mean “losing” the memory. To forget a painting, or any artwork, means that it is no longer an obsession, no longer a weight on the mind. It’s something you can finally look at from a distance and properly understand it.With this in mind, we can approach the exhibition as a kind of arrangement of memories.
The spaces of the Fondazione La Rocca host an anthology of works that present both the themes explored in the other exhibition locations, and the artist’s techniques for expanding a painting in space: from installation to video, from printmaking to sculpture.

Simone Ciglia: Landscape is one of the central themes of the exhibition, and we find it again in the main hall of the Fondazione La Rocca. It’s probably the right moment to talk about your largest and most ambitious landscape—the one that reimagines the presence of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—who’s been very important to you—in Pescara, against the backdrop of the city’s sky.

Matteo Fato: It’s a landscape I had in mind for many years—maybe since the moment I first realized that Wittgenstein’s words—just like yours, and Gianni Garrera's—help in healing the work. I mean, they help you take care of the thinking behind the work. And at the same time, they help with wounds you can’t really face directly through the work itself.
This landscape is basically the sky of Pescara, and within it there are two things—partly visible, partly not. They’re slightly hidden. One is a swallow, which refers back to a project you know well—the one we did with Cesare Manzo in 2009, about language. I was able to understand that project thanks to Wittgenstein’s words. He wrote: “I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly.” And to me, that’s such an important sentence: culture needs slowness in order to be read.
Then, within the landscape, there’s also this figure at the bottom—slightly off balance. It’s Wittgenstein, taken from Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein. It’s a beautiful film about his life. So it’s as if I wanted to show Wittgenstein the sky of Pescara.