NOIRE

“Experience accumulates for centuries, it grows collectively and individually, it drifts inside
the folds of histo ry and geography, it sediments in our thoughts and gestures, it pours into
our very being.
Things acquire the multiple, contradictory meanings which experience carries with it, they
are greasy from the contact with a thousand hands, thick with a thousand hearts and brains,
in this sense they have become signs.
Although the things in it are not used as signs, but somehow signs are used as things with
their own sediment of experience, my painting operates within that accumulation.
These portfolios are born from all of this, they consider the nobility of human work in an
activity of humble appearance, they offer a trace of an experience which is not meant to be
a metaphor for the tiles-maker but of man himself”.

– Giorgio Griffa, 1982