The Time of the Stain

Marco Raimondo

A mark that did not know it was art

Everything begins with a gesture that has no name yet. A sketch made during a phone call, while waiting, at the edge of an ordinary day. It is not made to be a work. It is born in the ordinary time of life, in an instant when the hand moves before thought decides.

This instant is the first time of my work. It is quick, involuntary, pre-conscious. It is not automatism as a method, chosen deliberately to bring the unconscious to the surface. It is something simpler and more radical: a mark that happens, without any artistic intention.

The immersions

The second time begins when I return to that mark. I scan it, carry it into another medium, and subject it to selective adjustments of brightness, contrast and saturation. The line becomes a chromatic field. Then the image returns to matter: the print on paper, the paint, the wax.

I call these passages immersions. In each one the surface absorbs, filters and reflects back. It absorbs what I give it, holds on to part of it, lets the rest go. What I see after each passage is never what I expected, and from there I decide the next.

I do not execute a plan. I respond to what each immersion leaves behind.

Two times in a single image

The final image holds together two times that do not usually meet. There is the speed of its origin: a gesture lasting a few seconds, born outside any intention. And there is the slowness of its making: weeks of returning, of waiting, of decisions taken by looking.

The first time gives the image its energy, its unpredictability, a form no intention could have designed. The second gives it depth: sedimented layers, as in rock or in the rings of a tree. Neither is enough alone. The sketch without elaboration remains a private trace. Elaboration without the sketch becomes composition.

This is why I say Digital Stain Immersion is more than a technique. It is a way of inhabiting time: staying for a long while inside something that lasted a moment.

Where time begins

Much twentieth-century painting made time its material. Colour left to soak into raw canvas. Successive passes that cover and reveal. The very duration of a life, counted and turned into a work. In these cases the time of the work begins in the studio, in front of the support, with the intention of making a work.

In my work it begins earlier, and elsewhere. It begins in everyday life, in a gesture that did not know it was art. The studio is not where the image is born, but where it is recognized and inhabited.

There is a second difference. My immersions do not take place in a single medium. They pass through paper, through the screen, and back to paper. The digital does not replace the hand: it is one of the surfaces into which the mark is immersed, one of the filters it passes through before returning to matter.

A recognition after the fact

Only after years of this practice did I find in Gilles Deleuze a description in which I could recognize myself. Thought as a line in motion. The diagram as a set of traces that do not represent but act, opening a space from which form can emerge. It is a recognition after the fact: the practice came before the theory.

The same holds for meaning. I do not fix it in the work. It happens in the encounter between the one who made the image, the image itself, and the one who looks at it. The viewer's gaze, in the end, is a final immersion.

Spaces of passage

My images are spaces of passage. They do not record a moment and do not illustrate an idea. They remain suspended between structure and flow: between the order that elaboration builds and the movement the original mark carries within it.

They are unstable constructions, and deliberately so. They hold the speed of their origin and the slowness of their making. In this sense each image is also a duration: the time I spent inside a gesture that, at first, had lasted an instant.