CARTE BLANCHE
2023

Saturno ✸ Bombom

In the last couple of years, as I’ve been searching for a space to work outside of my home (with not enough success…yet), I was caught many times imagining how the ideal one could look like, and why – even if it was a momentary portrait of it.

Since a paper is always a Carte Blanche waiting to be occupied by a drawing, an image, a text, I took this invitation as an occasion to construct with lines, filled shapes and words a possibility of a space that I would want and need.

I started from what would be the center of it but also the much-needed bond between the inside / outside dynamics: a big window. Following its middle point, a long line of movable tables and drawers that organize the space and attend the need for different paper sizes and activities in the room. In that same window there’s always a selected work being shown. It reminds me of a book holder that my father always had at the entrance hallway of his apartment, in which he would showcase a different rotating selection of open books and regularly ask for me and my sister to pick a new one from the bookshelf. As if a one-work exhibition was always on display – same for the window here. Next to the drawing boards, a table attached to a bookshelf that is also a hidden spot from the door and from the vitrine for more intimate and banal activities, like having meals, reading a book, writing and having coffee breaks with biscuits. On the top of the bookshelf, a projector to screen the selected movies from the Cinecosmos Cineclub program.

The façade has a big sign that says “Saturno Bombom” with consistent heavy letters that light-up at night, as the colors of the neon change the atmosphere of the vitrine and the exhibited drawing as well.

The window could be bigger, to show larger works (or at least encourage their making) but its size is the perfect one in between providing an exhibition space and a good sneak-peak while also offering some kind of privacy and mystery. A curtain can be closed as a background for the works being shown and with an arrangement of added objects that will positively mess up with the scale of the drawing or the painting, a miniature landscape appears, like the opening scene of the movie “One from the Heart” where the protagonist is captured arranging a window shop scenography with light-up objects and pulsating colors. The window makes room for different compositions of the objects in the space: the static ones on paper and other surfaces being shown but also the non-controlled movements happening on the background of the space, also framed by the vitrine as a constant moving image.

For now, or maybe for long, that would be my ideal one.