The visit also had a perfect coincidence. Inside, Andy Warhol was waiting for me. And not from his most repeated or most pop version, but from a territory that has always especially interested me: his relationship with photography, with portraiture, with series, with his way of turning an image into a document, character, object, and myth all at once. The exhibition Andy Warhol: Photo Factory was presented at Fotografiska New York between September 2021 and February 2022 and brought together more than 120 images, including Polaroids, photo-strips, gelatin silver prints, and stitched photographs, conceived as a direct entry into his visual universe and into the orbit of The Factory.

I had come to Warhol many years before, during that period of intense research when I began to build my collection and absorb everything I could find about certain artists, certain spaces, and certain ways of looking. In his case, I wasn't just interested in the work, but also in the system. I was fascinated by The Factory, the people who orbited around him, the cultural and social dimension of that place, its ability to turn portraiture into a language and photography into a kind of symbolic passport. There was something in all of it—in his method, in his intuition, in his way of producing presence—that I found deeply inspiring.

That's also why this exhibition resonated with me so clearly. Not out of sentimental emotion, but out of visual and mental affinity. His Polaroids, seemingly direct and simple, still contained a very powerful way of looking. And I connected that with my own photographic projects, with that urge to photograph people, to build series, to seek in a face something more than just a pretty picture. There, in the middle of New York, inside a building that in itself seemed like a statement of principles, Warhol once again reminded me that sometimes an aesthetic is also a structure of thought.