When Leticia Rocco's 11. 11 studio invited me to participate in a space that Francis Mallmann could inhabit, in Experiencia Living, I thought of two elements that unite us: textiles and fire. His way of cooking and my way of working with screen printing have something in common: excess, risk, what burns and leaves a mark. Textures that are close to the primitive, to the essential.
I chose not to portray him, but to situate him. To imagine him within the space.
The tree, with its bark marked by the heat of my technique, provides a backdrop for a picnic that is about to take place, but never does.
Inspired by his collection of Indian textiles, I focused on one of the most characteristic elements: the flower basket. In this project, I decided to use a lemon crate as a contemporary reinterpretation of that basket: a simple object, but one that Mallmann somehow elevates and takes to another level. I also included a flower bush, but not just any flower: I used the flowers that appear in the rugs he collects from the north and other regions, flowers that are very simple in their morphology because they are woven, but which also have their own unique beauty and symbolic meaning.
Above that scene, I created a suspended installation: fruits and vegetables cooking: a golden pineapple, cabbages, dancing cutlery, held by flying ribbons, giving it movement. And in the center of the composition, silence. That silence that interrupts the baroque, that emptiness that is also in his work. Because although his preparations have a lot of texture, abundance, excess, they also generate moments of calm. The baroque is not so much in how he sets the table, which is usually simple, but in the material itself. That's why I also chose that blanket in the center of the composition: simple, restrained, in contrast to the whole environment.
It is that blanket that waits. It is the calm center where, as in a frozen scene, the leaves of the tree, the lemons, the flowers, the fruits, and the vegetables cooking seem to be always about to fall.