Sinopie. Architectura ex atramentis

In Book XIX of Etymologies, chapter 17, De Coloribus, Isidore of Seville establishes the semantic field of the term “sinopia”: “Sinopis inventa primum in Ponto est: inde nomen a Sinope urbe accepit. Species eius tres: rubra et minus rubens, et inter has media.” Even earlier, Pliny (Naturalis Historiae, XXXV, 50.32) had used the term sinopis pontica for the shade of red typical of the four-color palette of the ancient masters, clarissimi pictores, Apelles, Aetion, Melantios and Nikomachos. The notebook pages that preserve the descriptions and places collected here are very similar to the sinopias of the past. They share with them a still germinal state of practice and their explicit characteristic as tools, the predisposition of means whose end is something else – for sinopias, painting; for me, building – and that only an accident, a process of removal has made visible: in the first case, the final marvelous, exquisitely colored visible surface, in the second, the built object. A fate that gives these jottings a second life, no longer secret but ghostlike, phantasmagorical, literally Unheimlich by nature. Just as the red marks were, so too these black ones can be painstaking and oriented towards future action or fatuously digressive, the compendium of inner slackness and deficiencies, and in any case, even if born in the common space of the studio, always bearing something that resounds like a personal tone, a private timbre. Their emergence or printing is the consequence of a mishap, an event not to be wished on anybody – collapse and the violent, devastating action of time or the impossibility of a building’s taking shape and life – and yet one to be grasped as an unhoped-for, unique opportunity granted so that they could survive publicly in some way, could participate in the life of society. Sinopias and notebooks are both the offspring of outdated techniques, of acts and skills close to inadvertently disappearing, not seductive enough for the sensibility of our time, as feverish as it is blinded, but slow and laborious enough to be subjected to constant rethinking and delay, hesitation and contemplation, pausing and starting up again, in other words to something that is not suited to the efficiency and performance indexes prevailing today. On the other hand, imagining the numerous pages of the notebooks freed of their binding and spread out all on one table, one can see clearly the impossibility of arranging them in a proper linear sequence or progressive development, as well as how they tend to follow a concentric, spiraling course – despite the amount of time passed, in the notebooks there dominates a strange synchronicity, a reversibility and reciprocity that contradicts the exact date and makes the pages contemporary with each other. Architecture in black, made and mixed with black and living only in this black: hidden, faint traces that, like those long-ago red lines, “serve to demonstrate that what is not, may be.”