artist statement
For years I’ve tried to write long stories that had a beginning, middle, and end. From comics to illustrations, I felt incredibly frustrated because the only thing I could relay was my own life. So I started to close my eyes, listen to myself, and look… and I realized that I wasn’t interested in relaying stories.
I don’t want to follow a train of thought (at least not intentionally). My paintings are bursts, brief glimpses like when you look at a landscape from the window of a moving train, instants frozen in time, of a dream we will never dream again. They are fleeting glances at a parallel reality where animals know all. Nature lives and protects and the little girls can decide to love, kill, or die.
At the moment I’m not interested in relaying a sequential story, what I want to do is pin down the memory of these places, these animals, these little girls. Because images go by too fast and I don’t want to forget them.
This strange land, inhabited by semi-ordinary creatures and little girls who are too elegant for our times, is the place where I’d like to wake up every morning and it’s the first place I see at night upon closing my eyes. The peaked cliffs by the sea fill my heart, that’s why they’re so recurrent in my paintings. For such a long time I had chosen the road of self-destruction (physically and pictorially) and now I want to put my faith in nature and its regenerative powers. The caress of the wind and the exhilaration of a distant horizon have become the new points of reference in my paintings. As well as the animals, these kind and mute presences.
In my paintings, nature and animals are solid and present and they will always remain even when the little girls have become women, then elderly ladies, and finally ashes. They will always remain even when that land has been deserted.
[...] artist statement [...]