The first time I wrote the phrase that gives this exhibition its title was on the paper tablecloth of a bar near my studio, while a mixed dish was taking shape in its indolent kitchens. I cut out the piece of paper with my hand and stepped out into the empty summer street like someone who has stolen something no one else has seen and carries within the joy of a secret discovery. These are strange phrases, which one barely understands at first and which, nevertheless, seem surrounded by a sense of certainty, as if in their strangeness they knew themselves to be true and were saying to you: “you’ll see.” In those days I was painting stars, and I had no doubt that I would indeed see. The phrase seemed to tell me “nothing can go wrong,” “the world is happy,” “paradise belongs to everyone,” and all of this is quite bold for a clumsy haiku scribbled on an oily paper tablecloth.

I had begun painting stars because I needed hope and did not have it. Sometimes one paints what one would like to have but does not, and then painting becomes an invocation, an amulet, an exorcism. Painting as a devotional gesture or an offering to unknown forces. A star is a light in the darkness, a guide, an unexpected help that appears at the worst moment. Seeing them fall is a symbol of misfortune, as if those beneficent or angelic forces had fought a great battle in the heights and had been defeated, and after their fall our destiny were sealed. On the other hand, it is said that whoever dreams of a starry sky may count on an improvement in their situation, which until then will have been desperate.

Stars contain a promise of the beyond, of the reverse side of life. It is as if when things go badly here, they go well there; as if when life here becomes complicated there were a place that, because of that, is like a five-star hotel. That place is infinitely distant and at the same time as near as the reflection in a mirror. From that place comes the hope of the living; that place is a hotel where the departure date is always extended one more day, where the sheets are never unfolded, where no one knows how to sleep. It is the hotel where all humanity goes for free, and which we call death, for the sake of brevity. The five stars I have painted for this exhibition are the hope that this hotel exists, or the certainty that the phrase I received came from someone who is there.

Aldo Urbano