Above: View of the wall with the title of the studio, 'Ritual Flesh'; Carlito signing a picture that he gifted me.
So these are all the pieces that will be on view at Canal Street?
Yeah. The exhibition on Canal Street, that is also kind of a manifesto, a vision manifesto, or whatever you call it, an experience, it’s called ‘Mythologia Libre,’ and it’s a lot about the end of all boundaries. I think there’s a new way to see art, to live art, and for me this is to destroy the boundaries between sculpture, painting, music, poetry, films, videos, so all these media are coming together to create one mythologia.
So you produced this music?
Yes, we created the whole soundtrack with a musician, with the poetry that, there’s one actress called Golshifteh Farahani from Iran, that I sent her my poetry, she recorded it, and then it comes back here, we took parts of classical music remixed — it’s a bit like the way I create my paintings, there are a lot of elements from different cultures and states of mind, I do the same with the music. You can also see some video loops — in the studio I have an animation table, so all the films I make here. I make my paintings with collage, so I take a lot of pieces before I do the collage with the painting and bring them to the animation table.
And what do you use for collage, what do you gravitate toward?
You know, I mostly use my own samples. I call it my supermarket.
So it’s all from you, it’s all produced from the same source.
Yeah, I do a lot, a lot of strokes, faces, characters and papers, and I call it my supermarket. When I’m doing a painting and I need a certain face with a certain emotion, I look for it and when I find it, I destroy it, cut it, mount it to the canvas. I call it archeology from the riverside, I put treasures and then I cover them a bit. So there’s a lot of layering in my paintings.