Matilde Izzia

Mario says that the objects look at you. I asked him once, half-curious, half-incredulous: “Who’s looking at me?” “The wardrobe, the teacup, the tablecloth,” he answered. “They watch you.” He wasn’t joking. And maybe it sounds like nonsense, but I’ve thought about it. That they speak to us, that I can accept. Why else would artists across centuries paint the same things over and over—baskets, dead birds, ripe melons, glass bottles, bowls, table linens? They wouldn’t do it just for beauty. There’s something else.

 

Mario calls them “sensitive objects.” He goes so far as to say they observe us, absorb us, carry something of us inside them. He once told me he left the house after staring at a trunk for a long time, and when he came back, the trunk almost seemed relieved to see him again. I just looked at him and said, “You’re really not normal, are you?” But he was serious.

 

Maybe he’s too sensitive, or maybe it’s just how his mind works. Maybe it’s youth, or maybe it’s just Mario being Mario. But I’ve come to believe something like it.

That objects, especially the ones that stay with us— the cup we drink from every day, the armchair that outlasted decades, the vase we dust absentmindedly— they do something more than sit still. They respond to how we see them.

 

I don’t think they have souls. But I do think they reflect us back to ourselves. They carry traces of our routines, our glances, even our moods. They are, in a sense, records. And maybe that’s why I paint them. Not because they’re beautiful or symbolic. But because they contain something of life—not dramatic, not grand, just persistent. Just real.

 

That’s also why I want Monferrato in my paintings.

Not just the hills or the churches or the trees, but the spirit of the place—

its quiet rhythm, its music, its ordinary sacredness.

That’s what I’m trying to hold on to when I paint.

Not an object, not a landscape, but a feeling that something here matters, quietly and completely.