Folio: Paolo Ventura’s visual quarantine diary

Paolo Ventura left the city of Milan in February for his home in Tuscany. The photographer, suddenly without a camera and within a home from which he could not leave, began working with the only materials he could find. Acrylic paint and some left-over wrapping paper used for re-doing the flooring offered Ventura an outlet, and he commenced a ritual of painting once a day – a visual quarantine diary.

This piece, painted on the 14 of March, is of Ventura’s morning coffee. A top the green round table stands the skeletal figure of a moka pot, a coffee cup, glasses and a double-sided pencil with which to ‘record some thoughts’. Slowly painting became an ‘intimate pleasure, a little solitude, an important pleasure’ for the photographer. Having never painted before, the discovery of this new practice during isolation was liberating: ‘I am like a kid. I wasn’t a painter, so it gave me the naivety to do something without worrying, I did it for myself’. ‘My work as a photographer is elaborate and complex, with painting I try to isolate elements and eliminate everything around it’. As Italy opened up, Ventura ceased the visual diary, but he is still painting.