Twenty-five years ago, I had my first solo exhibition at ‘Video Diva’ in Florence. It was not a ‘proper’ gallery but a space for art-related activities run by a group of friends and was named after the French film ‘Diva’ by Jean-Jacques Beineix. The video of the movie is put on the television screens in the different rooms of the rented shop-lot space on Via San Zanobi. One of the collective of friends is a painter, who is a friend of a friend, who has a brother, who was in a local band, whose music video was done by one of Video Diva’s partners. The painter was using the space at the back, a courtyard, to do his large-scale paintings. My friend and I would sometimes visit him at work if we happened to be in that area of town.
Winter in Florence is comparatively mild but it could get very cold at night. The influx of tourists is at its peak in summer so it is a pleasant time to be there, or any part of Italy, during the winter months. I had just arrived from Berlin a month and a half ago, and turned twenty-one. My Italian friends gave me baskets of food – pasta, homemade pesto, blood orange, and more pasta – as presents. I was staying in a summer cottage (in winter) on the outskirt of Florence. Instead of paying rent, I built architectural models for the architect who uses the cottage in spring and summer as his weekend retreat.
I was not a ‘proper’ painter then. All the works I did in Florence were on paper. A number ofcanvas works that were done in Berlin before were a mixed bag of still life and colour studies. There were a lot of peaches and flowers, in watercolour, chalk pastel or oil. A few portraits and small figurative works of friends and a handful of printworks, many in the styles of artists I was keen on following after seeing the originals in the museums such as Cezanne, Morandi and Kirchner, to name a few. The Florentine painter saw these paper works when he offered the possibility of an exhibition at Video Diva. I had a month to prepare and decided to do large scale, mixed-media works on masonite board.
The opening went well. It was announced on the local Florentine radio. Besides the handmade invite cards, word of mouth seems to work effectively. Besides my friends, and their friends, who were law or med students, I remember the show being attended by young fashion designers whose small boutiques are doors away from the ‘gallery’ on the same street, art students and a network of the painter’s friends in the music, design or creative industry. I took slides documentation of the artworks which were all angst-ridden figures in a composition of black, white and red against a sparse landscape. In one slide, I stood in front of a diptych of a male and a female figure, looking very cheerful.
So that was my official outing day as an artist, a crossing over the threshold into the fraternity/sorority of the art world. Until today, Florence remains one of my favourite cities even though I have to share that with a billion others. I still remain in touch with most of the friends I made then. They have all graduated, started their professional career, started a family etc. The painter married the American photographer he was seeing then and moved to New York. I returned to Berlin and four years later enrolled into an art school in Braunschweig.
Noor Mahnun Mohamed, Kuala Lumpur, 2010
