Confrontation with art, and the history of art, inevitably throws personal experience into a new light. The subjective is brought into relationship with the objective, material fact of the work of art. In a statement disarmingly entitled "This is What it is", Giacomo Picca has reflected on the relationship between the work of art which "exists because of itself", and the mutability of the individual life journey. In particular his move from one culture to another sharpened the riddle of the connection between the directly-felt and the historically-constructed, in the workings of our consciousness. "We all walk through a space somewhere between our experience and stories told to us of experience .... Through my own being - my psycho-geography - through my journey I have found that we inhabit many different spaces: there are shared spaces and universal images that we share; there are spaces created by cultures and societies whose images speak closely only to some of us."

It is as if, in his art, Giacomo went in search of a sign that would be universal, understandable in any culture, while acknowledging that the 'factivity' of the art object is actually the province of illusion.

Hence his title for this exhibition. "Trees for the Wood" - a playful reversal of the famous English proverb. The confusion is apt because in these 'paintings' wood is the pictorial surface, the material and the subject-matter. In the original proverb, "not to see the wood for the trees" means that you are so stuck in the particular that you cannot get a view of the general, the whole. But this 'general' is exactly what Giacomo seeks by means of his attention to the particular, the wood. 'Wood' becomes 'tree' becomes 'wood', as a universal symbol.