Always fascinated by the pictorial expression, one of my earliest childhood memories are the enormous frescos that I “painted” in our family home on the outskirts of Naples. My mum had left a big empty room with white walls, a space to express myself freely as my overflowing creativity was already evident!
In 2006, my creative urge became irrepressible and I started to paint on porcelain, attracted by the challenge of breathing new life into an ancient artform that was becoming extinct.
I wanted to reinvent, opening porcelain painting to experimentation and bring to the fore its endless possibilities. Furthermore, I wanted to transform mass-produced vases into unique pieces, i.e. contemporary art objects.
Vases that are destined to hold water as the source of life for flowers and plants have become a kind of canvas, thus losing their utility value and becoming “containers” of concepts: external/internal, nature/domestic environment, life/death.
A “dialogue” has started between my vases and my canvas paintings that are created with the same ‘stratification’ technique, alternating colours, materials, textures and using a variety of tools, not just paintbrushes but also palette knives, brushes, sponges etc...The superposition of different layers that for porcelain painting is particularly delicate and complex, requiring multiple firings at different temperatures, gives life to unique compositions immediately recognisable and identifiable.
The synergy and the resonance between my work is evident: together canvas and porcelain emanate a unique symphony depending where they are housed, but regardless of location, they succeed always to draw in the viewer, inciting a plunge into a parallel and iridescent universe. This timeless space is a kaleidoscope of light, shadows and reflections, suggesting an introspective connection and facilitating unexpected perspectives with multiple possible interpretations. My work should ideally be “contemplated” and observed from different positions. Each canvas painting has been conceived in 4 orientations (2 vertical and 2 horizontal) and in my diptychs, the possibilities are further multiplied. There are at least four paintings in one and the multiplicity of interpretations is amplified by the metaphors and recurrent allegories (roots, wings, mirrors, nets) which allude to a symbolic dimension where concepts of identity, transformation and evolution reside.
My works, often construed as a veritable variation of the possible, are evolutive, created, re-created and reinvented in different positions and under different lighting scenarios. I consider them to be creatures of perpetual evolution, alive and luminous in an expanding universe.
In the midst of my compositions, sometimes almost sculptural, different forms can emerge: often the silhouette of some personage or some other presence. The shadows seem to detach from the canvas to take us elsewhere into a meditative dimension. These anthropomorphous apparitions are suggested, never explicit and can quickly transform into different forms if the position or the observation point is changed. I wish that the viewers have a “lacher prise” so that they can release themselves to fully experience the possibilities of their perception.
I try to suggest the complexity of a fragmented world in which other dimensions become possible. The result is a feeling of going beyond the frontiers of the visible into the immaterial. This is what I perceive without equivocation in the middle of the creative process, a unique moment of grace and connection.
The creative process is slow and intense. It can last several months. I explore the deepest abyss to transpose the experience onto canvas as well as porcelain through a quest that aims to provoke discussion, comparison, re-questioning and going beyond the boundaries.
The material textures in my work suggest a sensorial dimension which is just a pretext, a door to another world in which the spectator is invited to incessantly explore their inner space. My personal and artistic research is an open dialogue between matter and the spirit, light and shadow, intuition and reason, life and death. It aspires to be a projection of the continuity of being, beyond the limits of space and time, an exploration of the antipodal limits, the search for commonality and the force emanating from opposites.