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Marco Pili's atelier is a white parallelepiped lying on the quiet outskirts of Nurachi. Three segments of simple green curtain shut the first room from the street glance. Dozens of canvases rest on the wall and the totems dedicated to is launeddas stand like people waiting at the bus stop. On a brown iron arch bells hang that ring if touched by the wind. Between this section, and the identical and subsequent, two large windows enclose a rectangle of uncovered gravel that houses dry spots of color and a solitary cactus.

In the middle of the laboratory, where a Dire Straits’ piece plays, a large table houses wooden cutouts for a series still concentrated on launeddas, the traditional Sardinian instrument, stylized to become essential geometric figures. In the shelf below, and in a large cart nearby, stays the main substance of all Pili's art, soil, contained in paint buckets. Limestone, sandstone, fine earth like sand, grainy or compact like clay. Reds of autumn leaves, lunar grays, ocher burned by mercury. It is all matter collected on long walks, especially in the small world of Sinis, which has never ceased to poke the sensitivity of the Nurachese artist.

“I really felt in depth the cycle of creations dedicated to Sinis. It was as intense as when I turned my painting upside down, going informal, starting to work with the “carasau” bread. It was in the 90s, I felt that contemporary art had moved away from individual identities. I wanted an expression that belonged to me. Fortunately, Sardinia is rich in culture, there is no shortage of stimuli. As well as the colors of the soil. You just need to move a hundred meters from a place to another to see everything changing under your feet", says Pili.

Pili started his art anew from farmers, from the wheat, the bread and the soil. From ox blood he obtained the bright reds. The technique has adapted to the material, three years to succeed in making the thin wafers of bread a thing only with the canvas. Several other to improve the technique with which he treats the soil with resin until it becomes a color. No sketches, no plans, no limitations. Creation proliferates and stops, get turned around, it finds a balance, it changes again. Pili works on the paintings with his bare hands, very little tempera, brush strokes are rare. They appear only for the transparencies, or to restore the impression of the water: a mirror barely present in the limestone atmosphere, or overflowing in the vertical space, disputed between the grassy plains and a black bank, alive and pouring in crossing the changing riverbed of the land. Deep impressions and relationships, dreams, a longstanding memory:

“I often visit beaches and ponds. They are the places of childhood, of long blurred summers. Nurachi was once surrounded by swamps. Water is always present in my works. Sometimes I add a small house, those built in the past on the coast, the usual legal tricks to favor a few. Men? They are not hosted in my paintings. I don't find them appropriate".