Palimpsest

oil on canvas
120 × 150 cm

Long ago, before the invention of paper, scribes and notaries had to be more careful with the parchments on which they wrote, and the old, no longer useful, text would be scraped off the surface of the parchment, which was then ready for a new text. These supports were known as palimpsests, which, being translated, means re-scraped.

I tried a similar procedure in the treatment of the canvas. With rough strokes, I painted over in black a previously painted, i.e. coloured and lettered, portrait format painting. When the new ground was dry, I wrote out the painting, now in landscape format, again in grey letters. The original painting, beneath several applications of black, could be discerned, some letters even in relief, and in some places they would reflect the light, and it was as if they were glinting. I called the painting “Palimpsest”, because of the similarity with the processes of working pre-used parchments described.

(2011; from the book “Pogled iznutra. Čitati s razumijevanjem” / “View from Inside. Close Reading”, Zagreb 2017)