This nature, seen and interpreted by man, becomes a poignant meditation on solitude, abandonment, absence and silence — though these themes are only apparent. Man is not there because he inhabits another realm. Bartolini’s square fortresses, tangles of marks and walls bleached by the Tuscan sun have little in common with what we are accustomed to seeing. Lives, sorrows, sounds, beginnings, tragedies, passages.

Massive houses like ancient fortresses, neither empty nor inhabited, but primordial alphabets of every civilisation, letters in a vocabulary that only time will reveal. Yet time itself enters into dialogue with something eccentric and immeasurable: the sky and its clouds.

Without surface or contour, clouds occupy no fixed place and have neither definite shape nor boundaries. The cloud, ultimately, poses a challenge to painting itself: it reveals the limitations and imperfections of representation, confronting us with a perspective that cannot truly be depicted.

Bartolini’s skies thus become a boundary, an elusive figurative presence in which the immaterial and the contingent seem to prevail.