“Ever since I can remember I have understood the world through a tangle of language. Growing up in a bilingual home that was culturally diverse from my surroundings, I was aware of a difference from my home inside and my world outside. When I think back to my relationship with language, I’ve realized that it was responsible for the relationship I have with my inner self and the relationship that I have with abstraction. Over the past couple of years, as I was making the works in this exhibition, time sort of suspended and morphed into an abstracted sense of demarcation. As the days be-came weeks, weeks became months, months became a year, and then two years, there was a different sense of space within time, a less defined sense of time—less moving around, more redundancy. A sense of suspended reality set in. During this period, I managed to make a trip to my childhood home. This felt like a rare occasion, whereas it is typically a regular occurrence. On this trip I found a book in my father’s vast collection, Una Cosa È Una Cosa, in English “A Thing is A Thing,” a collection of short stories written by Alberto Moravia. In this collection of short stories, Moravia's main characters, alienated from society, have no desire to use words to describe how they feel. Using an existential voice, Moravia describes the world as it appears—as if it were unnecessary to use words to describe it—a thing is what it is. On the cover, the title is beautifully embossed in gold letters, and on the inside flap, an illustration of a Pegasus included in the publisher's logo. My father typically inscribed his books with his name in his signature penmanship, but I took note of this particular book, first for its title, then because my father had inscribed an entire page with a note in Italian. "To my son Pasquale, so that through the readings of Moravia, he may realize the value of life. Just living is enough to make a man happy. We must make life art that, thanks to its fascinating beauties, can live eternally in our thoughts, meditations of the past, with the joy of the present and hope of the future. Affectionately, mamma Graziella" He inscribed the inside of Moravia's book, as if it had been written by his mother, because he sensed the need to disengage himself from his inner life and associate with his immediate landscape. My dad immigrated to America with his family in 1966. He read to live and lived to read. His life was being transformed, and existed in two separate lives—an external life where he conformed to the norms of American society and an inner life where he reconciled with his Italian particularities.” – Antonio Adriano Puleo