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There is a particular kind of comfort that comes from knowing how a material will behave.

I know how ink will travel across paper, how far I can encourage it before it begins to make its own decisions. I know, albeit intuitively, when to intervene and when to leave it alone. I know what soft pastel can bring afterwards: density, bold colors, earth against water. There will never be complete certainty, as ink would never allow that, but there is definitely familiarity.

For some time now, this conversation between ink, pastel and paper has been at the center of my work. It has given me a language I recognize as my own. And perhaps inevitably, it has created a comfort zone, a situation I do not particularly appreciate for longer than I should, in any aspect of my life. I am feeling now the desire to explore and evolve.

Over the past months, unfamiliar items have begun appearing in my studio. Intaglio inks. Textured papers. Stencils and tools that might introduce new ways of making a mark. Some have been bought with a precise experiment in mind and others simply because something about them made me curious. They now sit beside the mediums I know well, waiting.

There is something contradictory about reaching greater confidence in a technique and, almost at the same moment, wanting to introduce uncertainty again. You spend years learning what a material can do, developing gestures and instincts, understanding which accidents to keep and which ones can be avoided. Then one day the very fluency you have worked towards makes you wonder what other possibilities could emerge in the studio. And then the desire for the unknown asserts itself.

When the surface becomes familiar

Paper is the third participant in the conversation with ink and pastel. It is tempting to think of a substrate as neutral – the place where the painting happens – but paper is very much alive. It absorbs. It buckles (still more often than I would like). Its fibers receive liquid, slow it, pull it outward. Its weight and texture determine how much water it will tolerate and how the pigments settle. The surface answers back.

I have recently been testing different papers. A seemingly modest change in texture or absorbency can alter the entire sequence of decisions that follows. This exploration is utterly fascinating. The surface does not merely receive the image passively; it contributes to what the image will become.And yet another question has been sitting beside these experiments for considerably longer. It is advice friends, curators, and galleries have been giving me relentlessly.

I need to paint bigger.

What happens to a gesture when it has further to travel?

My recent works have often been intimate in scale. The Arborescence artworks, for example, are 31 x 31 cm. I like the concentration it requires. Within a relatively small field, every gesture matters. And increased control inevitably follows.

But I have known for some time that I want to understand what happens when the field expands.

Painting larger changes the energy of both making and looking.

A gesture made across thirty centimeters is performed primarily by the hand and wrist. Give that gesture a meter and the body acts differently. The arm travels and the shoulder engages. There is more room for speed, for boldness. Scale changes the physical act of painting. But size and scale are not necessarily the same thing. A small painting can contain an extraordinary sense of space, while a large one can somehow remain small. Simply enlarging my gestures would therefore miss the point. I am curious to see what happens to the relationships within the painting when there is suddenly much more room.

It certainly changes the viewer’s experience too. A small work asks you to approach it. A larger painting is already there, sharing your space. You have to deal with it differently. I have become increasingly curious about that physical presence. My encounter earlier this summer with Anselm Kiefer’s The Women Alchemists at Palazzo Reale in Milan intensified some of these thoughts. It is not about imitating monumentality, which can sometimes feel performative. I believe it is closer to permission: the realization that material, scale and thought can reinforce each other, and that ambition in painting can be both intellectual and physical.

Since then, scale has become harder to postpone. A recent conversation about my work with a curator gave the idea a more immediate form. What would happen if the next surface were not thirty-one centimeters high, but close to one hundred? I might need a push, as « someday » is a wonderfully comfortable deadline.

Canvas is not large paper

My first instinct has been to take what I already do and simply enlarge it.  A few years ago, I was painting on A2 sheets of paper and enjoying the process. However, an effect that feels effortless and precious at 31 x 31 cm may become artificial or irrelevant when reproduced at three times the scale.

As I also consider canvas, it does present another set of conditions. A traditionally primed surface can resist liquid. Ink that would sink into paper will sit on top, run or pool. Would I have to abandon the wonderful fluidity of ink? Then I realize it is not about the medium nor the substrate but about the language. And the challenge becomes: how can I translate my artistic language on a larger scale? I have begun researching linen and cotton canvases, different grounds and degrees of absorbency. I am curious about surfaces that might allow ink to retain some of the diffusion I love on paper without pretending that canvas and paper are interchangeable. At the same time, the possibilities of transparent layers and glacis intrigue me. The pastel could return. I do not yet know how these things will behave together. The contrast might be interesting: absorbed ink, luminous translucent passages, soft pastel sitting weightlessly above them. Fluidity interrupted by a mark unmistakably made by the hand.

Whether this will work remains to be seen, and this is precisely why it is worth exploring. I think here of Sigmar Polke, a painter whose work has always left me in awe, and of his extraordinary curiosity towards materials. Patterned fabrics, resins and lacquers, silver compounds, historical pigments, even meteorite dust found their way into his work. He seemed willing to try almost anything and there is something wonderfully free in that approach.

Becoming a beginner again

There is a peculiar pleasure in buying a material whose behavior you do not yet understand. The AKUA Intaglio inks currently waiting in my studio are a small example. They belong to the world of printmaking, and I am interested in what happens when I integrate them without feeling obliged to use them in the most conventional way. Patterns and stencils introduce the prospect of repetition and structure into works that have often relied on organic movement.

Some experiments will probably produce nothing worth keeping. The sentence is easy to write but considerably harder to accept in the studio. When you know a technique well enough to produce work you consider resolved, experimentation comes at a cost. You temporarily exchange competence for awkwardness. Something that looked extraordinary in your imagination may become uninteresting once it exists. A new material may refuse to do the thing you bought it for.

Yet failure in the studio is useful. I would argue it is necessary, as part of the journey. And occasionally, an unsuccessful experiment contains a tiny event – a granulation, a mark, an unexpected transparency – that fuels new ideas and opens a new direction.

What, then, makes a painting ours?

If I change the substrate, the scale and eventually perhaps the technique, will the work still be mine?

An artistic language is not summarized by the tools through which it emerges. And what I want to preserve lies far deeper than substrate and technique. There is color, certainly. The core and soul of my practice. There is movement, energy, gesture. There is the attraction of a landscape without the need to describe it literally.

There is the tension between intention and accident that has accompanied my work for years. I want to begin a painting with an idea without knowing exactly what the finished image will look like. If I can see the entire painting before making it, I am not sure I would ever engage in the process. And increasingly, there is storytelling. I am interested in the way we transform places, experiences, and memories into stories.

None of that requires a particular size. None of that requires paper. And maybe changing materials is one way of finding out which parts of a practice were fundamental, and which were simply habits.

A larger field

For now, the new materials remain experiments. I do not know whether canvas will replace paper, and I do not particularly want it to. The intimacy of paper still interests me. The Arborescence series belongs to it, and there are things I can do on paper that I may never want to translate elsewhere.

Coexistence seems more interesting to me than replacement. A small work can whisper something that would become absurd if shouted across a meter of canvas. A large painting can ask the body to participate in ways that a small one cannot.

Perhaps the next stage is simply making the field wider. More space for the gesture to travel. More materials and new techniques capable of surprising me. More opportunities for discovery. There is an appealing uncertainty in this. For the moment, I do not need to know exactly where those possibilities will lead. I only need to give them enough room.