Lake Como, the Ghandi quotation – and maybe more – much more – like the excitements of museumology, like the homage a painter-son would like to direct to- wards his painter-father, like general ideas of the celebration of art, like the saying accredited to Picasso: “The worst thing you can do with a painting is hang it on a wall where within a day it gets forgotten”. All enigmatic enough.

I went to see Giancarlo Vitali’s paintings stored in his son’ s studio in Milan. V elasco Vitali made comments and remarks and considerations about his father’s paintings. When he affectionately talked about his father, he was smiling. He said that the paintings were unfashionably figurative. They appeared to be uninterested in contemporary painting styles, tropes, obses- sions, fascinations, dogmas, sensibilities. I was struck by the fact that Giancarlo appeared not to be interested in being celebrated and took little interest in an exhibition of his work in Milan. Could this really be true? I learnt that Giancarlo Vitali had essentially given up paint- ing, that he did not want to paint anymore, that he was in his mid-eighties and still living on the banks of Lake Como. I have always been intrigued about artists who apparently, it was said, had given up on the very things that had deeply satisfied them all their lives and had lived on without practising them any more for many years after their curious decision to desist – Velàzquez, Shakespeare, Duchamp could be said to fit this category.

The Giancarlo paintings intrigued me. For me they were sombre, melancholy, claustropho- bic, sorrowful, sad. They were also painted with a quick and lively manner, handling paint with bravura and confidence. I enjoyed the brushstokes, the painterliness, the drip and splutter, scratch and smear of the paint. The stickiness. They reminded me strongly of the figurative painters of my art-school education in the very late 1950s – the Slade painters, Bomberg, Auerbach and Kossoff, who them- selves had been taught in the age of the Eng- lish impressionists by the likes of Sickert and Tonks and Augustus John, painters whose rep- utations had seldom travelled outside England. Their natural successor would be a painter like Lucian Freud. The Giancarlo paintings were also humble. They painted humble content – artisanal subject matter – material to be used – not just looked at – fish in a pan, table nap- kins, fungi to be cooked, broken fruit not to be wasted, scrawny naked chickens to be prized for the evening soup, inexpensive clothes to be rewashed and rewashed. And there were those self-effacing grandmothers who sat quietly in the corner of the kitchen. When the paintings quoted other painters they quoted the humble painters, Rembrandt, De la Tour, Soutine. They were also affectionately critical, quietly ironic, gently satirical. They embraced caricature but without venom. I considered the back and forth information I was being given and I could see for myself. I was intrigued.

I have never thought that painting historical- ly was painted to be hung aseptically on white walls in rooms where no body lived, in other words the way that paintings are habitually hung in galleries today, in artificial deliberately unchanging light along with little pieces of text that supposedly identify them. Do you at home – if you own and prize paintings – do this? Are not your paintings hung above the laundry, squashed along a wall with yesterday’s newspapers, partly hidden by an undrawn curtain, caught in patches of sunlight that keeps changing, accompanied by noise from the street and chatter in the room, and quickened by the scents and smells from the kitchen? Is your home an art gallery where you insult paintings by pretending they are either not there at all or are there to shout at you? English travellers in the seventeenth century returned to England after visiting Holland surprised that the Dutch hung so many paintings on all their walls, alongside the mirrors and the maps and the tulip vas- es, in the shadow of the servants carrying fresh linen and close by the unwashed dinner-plates on the breakfast table? It seemed to me that locations of perceived high culture were not so sympathetic to the paintings of Giancarlo Vitali.

We searched for places in Milan to hold a Giancarlo Vitali exhibition. I felt unexcited and had little enthusiasm to be involved until we walked into the Casa del Manzoni. A house of scuffed door lintels and poor light, dim wallpaper, of worn floorboards and scratched mirrors and a quiet gentility. The house had been gentrified into a solemn museum. But we could do something here – we could ungentrify it. We could domestic it. We could make it a temporary sympathetic home for Giancarlo Vitali’ s painting. We could consider making it a place where the ambience might say something to the contents of the painting. Where the paintings did not shout at you. Where the paintings respected the author’s reticence, his desire to be humble and reclusive.

I am much excited by the genius loci of a place. In the making of films, the architectural ambience is instrumental in supporting the drama you place within it. And that architectural am- bience is constructed of incidentals that are the