My Paintings Are Wiser Than I Am.

A Work Of Art Is Itself An Object, First Of All, And So Manipulation Is Unavoidable: It's A Prerequisite. But I Needed The Greater Objectivity Of The Photograph In Order To Correct My Own Way Of Seeing: For Instance, If I Draw An Object From Nature, I Start To Stylize And To Change It In Accordance With My Personal Vision And My Training. But If I Paint From A Photograph, I Can Forget All The Criteria That I Get From These Sources. I Can Paint Against My Will, As It Were. And That, To Me, Felt Like An Enrichment.

All Photographs Are Far More Important Than Any Painting.

A Student Researching Into My Work Has Actually Traced The Newspapers And Magazines Where I Found Theses Images And Has Found Out That Many Of Them Illustrate A Collection Of Gruesome Stories, Murders And Suicides Which Contrast With The Images Used. There Is A Contrast Between The Message Carried By The Text And That Suppressed By The Illustration.

I Believe That Art Has A Kind Of Rightness, As In Music, When We Hear Whether Or Not A Note Is False

I Wanted To Say Something Different: The Pictures Are Also A Leave-taking, In Several Respects. Factually: These Specific Persons Are Dead; As A General Statement, Death Is Leave-taking. And Then Ideologically: A Leave-taking From A Specific Doctrine Of Salvation And, Beyond That, From The Illusion That Unacceptable Circumstances Of Life Can Be Changed By This Conventional Expedient Of Violent Struggle.