Cities and Memory # 4 - Zora

Date : 1989
Materials : Pen, Ink, Watercolor on Fabriano Paper
Dimensions : 9.625" in. x 13.00" in (244m x 330mm)

Cities and Memory #4 - Zora continues the existential theme of the cities and memories series...desires are already memories.

*…the man who knows by heart how Zora is made...he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer’s glass tower, ...the statue of the hermit and the lion, ... the alley that leads to the harbor...in vain I set out to visit the city forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered…

…but in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.*

* 'Le citta invisibili' italicized Invisible Cities text is translated from the Italian, by William Weaver, in the English translation copyright © 1974 by Harcourt Brace & Company

Cities and Desire #1 - Dorothea

Date : 1994
Materials : Pen, Ink, Watercolor on Fabriano Paper
Dimensions : 9.625" in. x 13.00" in (244m x 330mm)

Cities and Desire #1 - Dorothea

…there are two ways of describing the city of Dorothea: you can say that four aluminum towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates with spring- operated drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds four green canals which cross the city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with three hundred houses and seven hundred chimneys.

…Or else you can say, …before then I had known only the desert and the caravan routes. In the years that followed, my eyes returned to contemplate the desert expanses and the caravan routes; but now I know this path is only one of the many that opened before me on that morning in Dorothea."

* 'Le citta invisibili' italicized Invisible Cities text is translated from the Italian, by William Weaver, in the English translation copyright © 1974 by Harcourt Brace & Company.

Cities and Eyes # 5 - Moriana

Date : 1988
Materials : Pen, Ink, Watercolor on Fabriano Paper
Dimensions : 9.625" in. x 13.00" in (244m x 330mm)

Cities and Eyes # 5 - Moriana expresses the duality of the text.

*…When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk in a semicircle and you will come into view of Moriana's hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloth, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, blind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.

From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.

* 'Le citta invisibili' italicized Invisible Cities text is translated from the Italian, by William Weaver, in the English translation copyright © 1974 by Harcourt Brace & Company.

Continuous Cities - Frontispiece

Date : 1995
Materials : Pen, Ink, on Fabriano Paper
Dimensions : 9.625" in. x 13.00" in (244m x 330mm)

Continuous Cities - Frontispiece

*…Kublai asked Marco: "You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us."

"For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two pas- sers by meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them.

If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire," you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said."

* 'Le citta invisibili' italicized Invisible Cities text is translated from the Italian, by William Weaver, in the English translation copyright © 1974 by Harcourt Brace & Company.