2. o (le sacre coeur and rue saint rustique) 2008/09
3. r (le moulin sannois) 2008/09
4. e (rue norvins) 2008/09
5. i (place du tertre) 2008/09
6. s (rue du saules) 2008/09
7. u (renoir’s garden) 2008/09
8. t (the philosopher’s tower) 2008/09
9. h (church at villetaneuse - dusk) 2008/09
10. r (rue ravignan - le bateau lavoir) 2008/09
11. i (the house of hector berlioz - night) 2008/09
12. l (le lapin agile - snow coming) 2008/09
13. l (le lapin agile and rue du mont cenis - snow receding ) 2008/09
14. o (la grande maison blanche – snow clouds massing) 2008/09
15. triestement 2008/09
16. triestement 2009
sound piece
17. Installation
18. Installation
19. Installation
20. Installation
21. Installation
22. Installation
triestement (more-is u thrill-o)
Domenico De Clario
2009
One wet June afternoon in 1962, on my fifteenth birthday in fact, I decided to search for something of interest in the Brighton High School library, something that would take me out of my little world.
I immediately came across a book with the aptly intriguing title of ‘The world of Maurice Utrillo’. I was as much drawn by the subject’s Italian-sounding name as by the brightly coloured painting of a street scene printed on its cover. As I leafed through it I seemed to somehow recognize the shape of houses and the somber depth of skies animating each of Maurice Utrillo’s paintings. Inside the front cover a photograph of the bereted painter graphically described a wearily detached, pained man.
Impossible that I would know these streets, I thought; I have never been to Paris. But the stones and the gardens and the skies of Utrillo’s Montmartre seemed to me to be exact replicas of the ones that, according to memory, I had left behind in Trieste, the city I had lived in from birth until the age of nine.
They were certainly nothing like the Brighton I had to amble through each day on the way to school and back again. The Brighton of the early ‘sixties was a drab waterside working-class suburb, located far from Melbourne’s crowded city centre and characterized by scrubby front lawns and dreamy gums sweeping their melancholy foliage across a streaky sky. On foggy mornings ships’ horns would intermittently transmit their anxious wails over the still air of the bayside suburbs like so many lost, wounded animals, wandering in a daze around Port Phillip’s grey waters.
