Andrej Mussa from Como
Your new daily ritual.
I eat a little more… Suspended in the house I rediscover forgotten flavors and smells, but my daily life has always been almost entirely domestic: son of chefs then restaurateurs. The kitchen understood as a place dedicated to culture has always been fundamental for me. As a child I did my homework on the kitchen table, then on the same, as an artist I design food labels… In these days of permanent "quarantine" I discover the ease of remembering.
How your way of working has changed?
It hasn't changed, as I was saying, my methodology has always been domestic. I miss landscape forays, but I'm lucky to have windows overlooking the town, so in these days of forced closure my paintings look outward. I leave the painted food aside, the same one forgotten on the table, and I paint what I see from the window. During these long days I look out the window for a long time like a landscape poet.
With which objects and spaces of your daily life are you interacting the most?
There are two spaces: the kitchen and my study located on the upper floor of the house. I love deadlifts… The breaks that allow me to move from one place in the house to another. The objects are those that characterize my painting: food conditioned by our daily trends and fashions, then the window, countries that interact with nature.
Museums and galleries have reacted to the moment with digitalization and virtuality. What are your "strategies" for establishing new relationships?
I'm not establishing new human relationships, I'm looking for the ones I already know. If you mean from an artistic point of view, then I can confirm that my communication "strategy" has always been digital and social. The art gallery, known as a socializing place for the arts and artists, it no longer exists…
New places and alternative spaces of cohesion have been born around you? (we think of the courtyards of the palaces, to the terraces etc…).
Once (I remember my late 70s) we told each other on the balconies of condominiums, and we played in the courtyards. These places, let's define them as "alternative" cohesion, they were already used, perhaps we can reuse them today from an artistic design point of view. But it is the "system" that will have to change, there will be a strong skimming towards places of the arts. This is good.
Andrej Mussa at twenty he was convinced that making art was a mission, an activity aimed at the propagation of an artistic religious faith (for unsuspecting people) capable of solving the world's problems. At forty, he understood that problems exist and will always be there also because there is an Art "aimed" at "painting" problems... Exalting them. He has collaborated with the most prestigious Italian galleries, among these we remember: Placentia Contemporary Art (Piacenza), Velan Center for Contemporary Art (Turin), Romberg Contemporary Art (Latina), Rocco Guglielmo Foundation (Catanzaro). His quarantine painting project focuses on intimate deviant “domestic” intrusions into an artist's everyday life: windows on the countries, windows on houses. Situations, stolen, repeated, resumed… Paintings focused on the non-mediocre part of one's everyday life, by diminishing, as much as possible, the null moments. Stopping for a moment, a thin poetic line between memory and landscape. Forgotten daily affections on the tone of a color, on the memory table. Through naive paintings; everything domestic, every village house are found in the duration of the feeling. www.andrejmussa.com