Palermo. June. 6:30 AM. Hot. Appointment. Artist. Fabrizio Ajello. A studio... no, a room.

The studio where a painter not only paints but also lives is a sacred and magical place. It's a temple of memory and alchemy. Time passes differently there compared to the outside world. Inside a studio, existence coagulates on the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the doors, and even on the clothes of those who enter. It hides within the eyes of those who spy. It infiltrates everywhere, transforming and being transformed. The air is dense because it's compressed within a single room where the artist must eat, sleep, paint, write, and love. Night could be day, and day could be night. The years have given everything an organic and disorderly order. Canvases upon canvases, squeezed tubes, crushed paint jars that hold brushes of all sizes, candles half-burnt, bottles, distillers, forks, plates crusted with food and paint, blankets, blunt pencils, books, easels, rags, scraps, notebooks, papers, scraps of paper. A microcosm in the swollen eyes of a late awakening, in the coldness of winter light that makes gestures, waiting, mistakes, and the daily steps of those who create while living and live by creating precious. The photographic gaze follows the hands, the contortions, the efforts, the folds, the breaths on paper, against the canvas, never stopping, never composing, but surrendering. Werner Herzog affirmed that using an easel is merciless, revealing only fixed, motionless, dead images. That's why the camera here is handheld, allowing it to necessarily breathe with the breath of the viewer. The photographic eye in these images in no longer testifies; it has now become a breath.