The first piece of information is obligatory. This exhibition is being held by tacit consent, without having involved the works’ creator, who simply allowed almost three hundred paintings to be taken away the week before Christmas. But perhaps not everyone knows that resentment breeds values. The route to be taken leads to giving up hope. Having no choice, the world remains shut out. From that moment on it’s enough to wait, certain things are done only when it’s too late.

So, roughly speaking, Luigi D’Eugenio lives and works in 25 square meters. He knows he can go out, but knowing that is enough for him. He doesn’t let common sense spoil things and he doesn’t waste his time. He always renews the same torture, a premeditated painting in oil, on pieces of cloth like bedsheets whose weave he saturates with a water-soluble plastic film that is used for embroidery. He lavishes so much care on his images that he falls in love with them, reducing the definition in order to discover the reason and making his own paints. He unrolls the fabric from bottom to top, reproducing the image as proof of his fidelity. An error is a betrayal. At his age he paints like a fax machine. There is some comfort in the fact that you always find him there, among his things, in a scheme over which he has total control. Oppy and I turn up at his door, always without an appointment, otherwise he would ask for explanations and they’d never be enough. We’ve known him for thirty years, and for thirty years he’s never stopped mixing up his anxieties with his work. The Web arrived, becoming the only window on everything.

This is the exhibition of someone who has no résumé, who has no market, and who isn’t looking for one, the show of someone who doesn’t exist. No one in this story knows in detail how we are going to do what we are doing, but given that we’re doing it it’s clear that it can be done.

—RC

Thanks to Oppy De Bernardo, Max Mondini and Daniele Innamorato