still, La Terra Trema, reg. Luchino Visconti
“Granita with Artist” is what surfaced from this moment of suspension. You “painted” it in the truest colors you knew, in a style that demanded no flighty interpretation. You appreciated the dual coldness of representation and title—the scarcity of color gave it an almost monochrome palette, drawn out from umbers and blacks, cadmium white, bluish-greys. The title framed the entire transaction for you, condensed the drive away from the dusty city, the façade of the small pink house, the adolescents splayed out on the sciara, into one extractable essence. The truth is that you didn’t even need the painting, and that is why you preserved the image in the living pigment of memory. The sciara still spoke to you in verses of slippery stone, in labile intonations. At times, you awoke feeling the grit of the granita on your tongue and the lingering bitterness of lemon rind. And even the jackal face of the artist surfaced periodically out of the ruins of the times when you knew each other.
