petale de rouille I (2005) Painting by Pietro Calabrese

rust,
and the playing

To me, rust on canvas means playing,
circling a canvas framed by building site boards, dancing and watching the dance of those plates which, one after another, I allow to penetrate the canvas for hours, layer by layer, day by day, thought by thought, rust by rust.
Is it rust, that part of you which lives within you and steals space from the other part, the part you would like to be but aren’t? The part, perhaps, that you are obliged to be?
And then everything is reversed,
the rusts begin to emerge, casually, and they say: “we are Pietro’s rusts”.
And you are a child again…….as an adult.
Rust emerges from iron? So you call on your blacksmith friends and ask: “got any iron plate leftovers?”, and they give you them, pieces of every shape and size, and you examine them, you sand them down, you wash them, you prepare them…..
Rust needs water in order to come into being? So you place a canvas in that water and you begin to dance, you begin to jump, from one iron plate to another, from one iron leftover to another.
Iron plates need weights in order to sediment on contact? So you begin filling buckets with water, more and more buckets, more and more water, buckets everywhere, buckets from everywhere, days spent looking for buckets to adopt, and then you fill them, with water, and you move them from one plate to another, until the whole canvas has been filled with iron plates buckets water moods thoughts.
Then you take them away, they’re heavy, you take away everything, everything, all that remains is the canvas the frame some water, and rust, freshly emerging.
You look at it, and each time it’s different, with each plate it’s different.
And you begin again, you put the plates back in place the pieces of wood to distribute the weight of the buckets and the buckets, the playing recommences, plate on plate, and within those plates, those days placed one on top of the other, you discover some surfaces, between the layers, and you enter.
And then you play the game of playing, and begin to push, move and block, reduce and expand, dilate and compress, you begin to burn and dilute, using your head, your shoulders, your hands, that space which you had never brought to conclusion on a surface.
Until you stop, because it is no longer rust, it is Pietro’s rust.

And it has a name.
Its own.

• Nationality: ITALY
• Date of birth : 1967
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Italian Artists