Untitled 1999

Ettore Spalletti made this thing, this object, and what is it? A slab of baby blue sits on a white plinth, but the way the color’s been worked, it’s not just *on* the surface, it's *in* the surface. Spalletti is really digging into the material qualities of paint and plaster. I bet it took a lot of effort to make it look this simple. Did he build up layers, scraping them back to find this exact hue and texture? I imagine him stepping back, squinting, then going back in, again and again, until the color and form are just right. That dreamy blue… it reminds me of the sky in an early Renaissance painting. So smooth, so pure. But then that plinth is brutally modern. This piece really encapsulates something about painting itself, how it’s always caught between illusion and object, between the ethereal and the material.