About a year ago, a word which I had never taken in great consideration, revealed its secret to me. "Morbid" in English has a rather macabre meaning and so does in Spanish, Portuguese and French as its Latin origin comes from the word "morbus" - illness. However in Italian -my native language- "morbido" just means "soft", with no apparent memory or residual link to its deadly origins. The reason of this bizarre shift comes from the softness of the dead flesh, weakened by the illness, leaving the body in ruins. Yet there is something in the idea of decay that Italians hold dear, a mystical sentiment, a sense of nostalgia that over the centuries has been formidable source of a more profound, lyrical interpretation to the world.

And I as well hold it dear: accepting the inevitability of moments of pain, softening my consciousness and pushing it to a state of malleability.

"Mente morbida" is the state of the convalescent mind, softened by the illness, now hypersensitive. It is a lens intensifying the world around, making its colours more vivid, its shadows sharper. It is a perceptive state into which childhood memories, readings, remote images and everyday life convey in lyrical compositions, portraits of different facets of my "self".