Google Earth Project

I’ve always loved looking at the world from above. Since I was a child I trained myself to imagine how things would look like watched from the sky. I think now that  it was an emotional way to guess the point of view of God or of the angels. Still as a child I remember that my little prayer in the evening was finished only when with my thumb I drew an imaginary L shape on the palm of my left hand . That L shape was, from above, the plan of the three bedrooms we slept  in and it was my way to ask that nothing bad would happen during the night . I was twenty when I began to paint landscapes seen from above, whether they were real or imaginary. I started calling them soulscapes very soon. Even while living in London I was always trying  to climb as high as I could in order to be able to look down, often on hills  or buildings, once even on a hot air balloon in Vauxhall. The reason is that when I look down, if there is something curled up or painful in me, it does calm down. Google Earth arrived in my life two years ago. The day I discovered it I went straightaway to see my house in London, which I had left two years before . It was an overwhelming emotion and I cried while I was looking at the roof  all lit up and the magnolia tree close by the little red fence . In time I continued to use Google, going where I’d go if I had wings. Or simply where I dream to arrive one day. New York? Buenos Aires? Zarate? Lisbon? Or the pyramids or the Rugen’s white cliffs painted by Friedrich? I have realized that these Google Earth generated images are deeply rooted in me and they are part of my way of thinking. At night, when I can’t sleep I think about places and people in my life, and Google Earth has lent me images and points of view. Now it has become clear that the time has come to work with them, and I have started doing it. I start from images of places that are important to me, or of events both real and  imagined. Working, I superimpose thoughts and marks, whether in pastel, graphite, acrylic or oil paint. Afterwards I migrate somewhere else, free in a way that my body, constrained by matter and by social, economical and physical limits, has never been before. I fly. Just yesterday I was in Africa, near Marrakesch, where I found yellows and shapes that would have never otherwise entered my life. These works, which I start publishing today, will be called Google Earth and will be numbered progressively. Off I go. (10^th July 2007)