STATEMENT
I’ve always felt this urge of drawing and expressing myself through colors since I was a kid.
I love to work with different materials and with different techniques: oil, watercolors, ceramics, building small conceptual installations.
My life is my inspiration for my Art: my struggle to fully accept my own homosexuality, my profound and at times not that good obsession/relationship with my own mother, my dealing with illness facing my own mortality. And during that time a big help for me was spending a lot of time in Sicily which is my parent home region: the smell of delicious food walking on the streets, the scenery, the architecture, the Mediterranean culture… in one word Sicily.
In the majority of my practice I focus on the human body. The way I realize my drownings is influenced by Classicism. While in the pictorial I tend to be more free and to use more an impressionist technique.
In my canvases you’re going to find fragmented/broken bodies: harms, hands, heads… This is a metaphor about the way I see relationships between us human beings and it doesn’t matter if it’s intimate or socially. Because sometimes it’s very difficult to communicate with each other, to be empathic, connecting with our soul and consequently with other people. In those situations the bond can be broken or even missing.
I tend to be obsessed by representing people who touch each others because after my family members had discovered my homosexuality they wouldn’t embrace me for the next years because they were repelled of the idea of me with another man. And during that time I missed so much my mum hugging me.
In addition to that, lately I’ve been working on a new concept introducing colored figures too. The past few years my attention has been focused on the difficulties of the pandemic time.
In Italy the lockdown was really strong. My husband and I were locked in our apartment for almost 2 months. That was for me a very prolific time and I would work day and night on my art. That loud silence coming from the streets inspired me to focus on myself and subsequently to create new works.
In Italy the lockdown was really strong. We couldn’t see no one except the beloved one with whom we lived together. During this pandemic another sense has been mutilated: the touch.
So, in my canvas, colored shadows appear next to the visible people which have closed eyes or sun glasses. And even though you can’t see a clear face or details of them, they are expressive as much as the “real ones”. Some people see in those figures the missing ones. Others see the possibility of trying to communicate with others in a more empathic way that transcends our senses: perhaps the language of the heart.
And in all my canvases the eyes are always closed. We close our eyes when we pray, when we cry, when we kiss, when we dream…. Because the most beautiful things in life are not seen but felt with our heart.
I can consider myself a melancholic person and I think this part of me is reflected in my paintings even though i use bright colors. It’s part of me, of who I am. But I don’t see this as negative. For me it’s an opportunity to stop, to meditate, to think about my journey, to understand what it has been and to move on.
In my paintings I try to use beauty to reach happiness but there is no guarantee of success. What is important to me is the journey to feel that happiness. Because once you get it it’s gone.
And in this context I like to consider other 2 concepts: limit and possibility. Because thanks to the limits that we can experience in life we can understand and accept our own limits. And in doing that we can overcame those limits and evolve as human beings.