Domenico de Clario interviewed by Jean de Loisy of Fondation Vincent Vin Gogh
de Loisy: The idea of installing a mailbox in Vincent’s name evolved from our exhibition about Van Gogh’s letters. How did you respond to the invitation to design it?
de Clario: My immediate reaction was to feel extraordinarily honoured to have been commissioned to make a work celebrating both Vincent and the Maison Jaune as part of the foundation’s exhibition: I was also struck by the coincidence between this proposal and an artistic project I had begun a few months earlier.
In October 2025 I had built a model of an imaginary maison jaune with four wooden panels painted in ‘butter yellow’ on which I had inscribed three of the letters I had written to Vincent on the occasion of three of my birthdays; the first letter had been written in 1955 (on my 8th birthday), the second in 1990 (on my 43rd birthday) and the last in June of 2025 (on my 78th birthday).
Since their writing I had kept the original letters with me always and I had brought them here to Arles, with no idea that they would become relevant to any particular project. But as I worked on my imaginary model of the maison jaune and inscribed its outer ‘walls’ with my letters their destiny had become very clear to me; the three letters would be sealed inside the maison, to be un-sealed only on the date of my 113th birthday on June 5 2060. This date would signal the end of the three 35-year periods that had marked their writing; but what might constitute the contents of the fourth letter to Vincent, which I hoped would be inscribed on the roof of the Maison Jaune on the 5th of June 2060 – and who would then write it, given that I would not be alive in 2060?
I decided that the fourth letter would be written by all the sunflowers that Vincent had ever painted; I imagined the sunflowers to have been the very first and last witnesses of Vincent’s
loving gaze, transmuted through his paintings of them into loving touch, and the only non-human true companions Vincent had through his final years. His relationship with the sky, clouds, water, trees and flowers gave me the confidence I needed to somehow imagine that only sunflowers – and not any human being – would be capable of composing the very final letter to Vincent, whose form and content I could not, of course, predict or even imagine.
I inscribed a provisional note on the fourth wall of the model Maison Jaune declaring as much, in the hope that whoever would be in possession in June 2060 both of the model maison jaune and the monument – indeed if they were to be still in existence – would find the most appropriate way to manifest such a letter.
de Loisy: You have clearly admired Van Gogh since you were a child. In fact, at the age of eight, you wrote your first letter to him. What motivated you to write to an artist who was no longer alive at such a young age? Tell us about that first letter and the three that followed it?
de Clario: I had no deep understanding or knowledge of Vincent’s paintings as a child but I’d heard my parents speaking of his life, his intensity and his passion. On my 8th birthday in 1955 my
third-grade teacher in Trieste, Prof Biasini, as a kind of special birthday gesture – knowing I was particularly passionate about drawing and painting – decided to share with me and my class the colour images inside a book of Vincent’s paintings.
When he came to an image of ‘La Nuit Etoilée sur le Rhone’ I began to have an adverse reaction, manifesting as a strangely emotional state, further accompanied by a sudden fever. I’d not seen the painting before but I suddenly remembered – as the teacher showed us the image – that the previous night I had dreamt of a scene very similar to the painting, especially of what to me then seemed to be the ‘convulsing sky’ and the swirlingly flowing river. The teacher noticed my disturbed state and took me aside in order to soothe me; he then suggested that perhaps if I wrote a letter to Vincent directly explaining my reaction, my condition might abate. I followed his advice and indeed the fever passed and I calmed down.
I have kept that letter with me since then and it’s now inside the model maison jaune I made in October, along with the other two I wrote in 1990 and in 2025. Writing a letter to Vincent at key moments of my life (there have been two since 1955) became the remedy for a deep, inexplicably existential, anxiety – the kind that Italo Calvino deems to constitute: ‘my own particular anxiety’.
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I had mistakenly calculated Vincent’s life to have lasted 35 years rather than 37, and so on my birthday in 1990 – a particularly anxious moment which was unfolding exactly 35 years after the 1955 letter – I decided to write to Vincent once more. There was another reason, beyond ‘my own particular anxiety’ that caused me to write that letter; I had had discussion early in 1990 with James Mollison, the Director of Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria (Australia’s oldest and most important public Gallery, possessing its largest collection) about the possibility of my installing a major work at the NGV using its entire collection, but re-arranging it according to an elemental structure, not according to either an art historical sequences or any chronological ones. We agreed that it would take place sometime in 1993 (public galleries must plan early!), during the same period in which a significant Vincent exhibition titled ‘Van Gogh; His Sources, Genius and Influence’ would be installed in the NGV right next to my project. I was of course deeply excited and honoured to be sharing such an important space in a public Gallery with Vincent, and so it
was that in 1993 I installed a major work titled ‘Elemental Landscapes: the Seventh Art’, while the large Van Gogh show was installed in the vast rooms adjacent the Murdoch Court, in which I had installed the re-defined NGV collection. All this excitement caused me to dream of Vincent and in my 1990 letter I describe my dream to him as well as the source of some of my anxiety.
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In 2025 I lived in Rue Favorin in Arles (where I still live), just around the corner from the Café de la Nuit, and so of course it follows that I had then even more reasons to have Vincent inhabit my consciousness. In my 2025 letter I speak to him almost as a friend and confidant, perhaps as a neighbour, as someone I have come to know. On my 78th birthday I remember being on the terrace of the Hotel Calendal and looking into the sunset as I celebrated my having so unexpectedly reached this age with my friends Tony, Borje, Maria and other friends.
During the previous night I again had dreamt of Vincent and the Rhone River (I have walked across the Trinquetaille Bridge so many times…) and in the dream I felt very old, so old in fact that I believed I would soon join him and I told him as much in the letter.
de Loisy: Can you describe the work and what influenced your decisions in terms of form and materials?
de Clario: I had almost foreseen the form of the work I would propose for the commission by having made a model of the Maison Jaune in my Rue de la Liberté studio; my mind was already aligned to the idea of the Maison Jaune as a box (much like a jewellery box) inside which the most precious objects one owns are stored for safe-keeping – like my letters to Vincent. I imagined that letters to Vincent by innumerable others from around the globe would also find a space akin a safety-box – but constructed in the form of the Maison Jaune – an empathetic space to have their precious letters delivered to and stored in until collected.
I reasoned that in order for each of the delivered letters to Vincent to feel at home the monument itself inevitably had to take on the form of a small version of the Maison Jaune, constructed on two floors – ground and first floor – just like Vincent’s real Maison Jaune. But I also wanted to somehow refer to Vincent’s passionate insights into the starry sky and the swirling heavens and to the unique shapes of the sunflower, which Vincent loved so deeply.
So, I considered that perhaps twisting the two floors slightly would re-configure the Maison Jaune as both an eight-pointed star and a sunflower filled with light, with Vincent’s letters inscribed on the outer walls of the upper floor and mine on the lower floor. In that way he and I might finally inhabit the Maison Jaune together, at least in a symbolic way. And of course, the Sunflowers’ letter would be inscribed on the very top of the Maison Jaune, where only sunflowers could and would reach in order to feel Vincent.
Naturally the monument had to be yellow, but not painted yellow; yellow intrinsically right through its flesh, and brass is the ideal material; strong, light and historically a local product that had long ago been produced by the Romans, as ‘golden yellow as butter’ shining translucently in the sun, like a golden orb, a star pointing the way to where the body of the Maison Jaune had once been, and to where its golden soul still glowingly resides. In that sense, because neither Vincent nor the Maison Jaune still exists in any physical form, my monument intends to honour Vincent’s soul, the undeniably incorruptible substance of its gloriously golden invisibility, rather than honouring any obviously corruptible brick-and-mortar appearance. In the end Vincent aimed through his art to manifest what is normally invisible, and in so doing he aimed to afford us all the opportunity to contemplate the fundamentally universal relationship between visible and invisible.
de Loisy: Is there a particular letter, sentence, or passage in Van Gogh’s correspondence that really resonates with you?
de Clario: Each of Vincent’s letters, whether to Theo or to his sister or mother or any of his fellow artists is extraordinary in its deep insight, humanity and empathy for the mysteries of the
invisible. I won’t privilege any one letter or any fragment of a letter over any other for fear of doing an injustice to the entirety of the body of his writing.