Lessico familiare
(Family lexicon)
This project was born as an investigation of the emotional depth of memory arising from the aesthetics of vintage images belonging to my family (mainly black and white photographs from the first half of the 20th century). The interest in this subject was born around 2012, when after about ten years of working as an illustrator of children's books, I decided to take a break to dedicate myself to painting and to subjects towards which I felt more empathy from a creative point of view. Initially I reproduced black and white photographs belonging to my family members using the oil technique, deepening my work on memory and the sense of belonging to a family, to a history and to a specific culture. During this period I also discovered the work of the French author Annie Ernaux, with her peculiar ability to blend historical and individual experience in her narrative. The author defines herself as an "ethnologist of herself", but personal experience is described as a social product, and the "individualized self" gives way to a "transpersonal", collective dimension; just as autobiography leaves room for history. In the book "Les Années" (The Years) from 2008, the writer often focuses on material memories such as family photos, many in black and white, making the text very rich in visual suggestions. Even in my pictorial works I started from photographs that reproduce my relatives as a story of the life of my closest ancestors, from whom I feel I am moving further and further away, partly with a strong nostalgic component. This new path also coincided with my return to Italy after ten years of living in Scotland. A return to one's places of origin at a mature age always involves a good dose of readaptation to a culture which, in the distance, has often become idealised. But together with the nostalgic content towards an Italy of the past, and towards my culture of origin, in this path there is also the need to move away from the creative practice that characterized the years of my work as an illustrator, during which the continuous effort was to create fantastic but at the same time credible imagery, respecting the narrative suggestions of the text to be illustrated. On the contrary, no longer having to invent anything, no longer having to worry about composition, narration, colors, suddenly meant the pure freedom to concentrate exclusively on painting, on making painting as a gesture that replaces thinking. The founding principle of this project is that these images are not simple visual reproductions, but part of a "lexicon" - a family code - which brings with it memories and traditions that evoke the domestic environment and emotional bonds.
Masks are compulsory
The subject of this project is the relationship between reality and fiction, driven by a sense of loss: how does the continuous disappearance of rituals and collective holidays, and their potential to subvert and mock authority using "rituals of inversion" (Gluckman), influence our relationship with power? It is a topic that I have developed over the years thanks to two main factors: having worked for years as a free-lance illustrator of children's literature and a fascination for black and white photography of the past, especially from the first half of the 20th century. The interest in this subject was born around 2012, when after about ten years of working as an illustrator of children's books, I decided to take a break to dedicate myself to painting and to subjects towards which I felt more empathy from a creative point of view. Initially I reproduced black and white photographs belonging to my family members using the oil technique, investigating a work on memory and the sense of belonging to a family, to a history and to a specific culture (see the “Family Lexicon” project). Later I felt the need to reclaim the fantastic component that characterizes my work as an illustrator. I therefore began to move away from my family's photographic repertoire to look for photographs that still had a "surreal" or visionary component, such as photos of people dressed up for Carnival. I'm fascinated by the fact that these images look like photographs taken from a fantasy world, but in reality they are photographs of real moments. In summary, it is as if I were following a reverse path to the one I follow as an illustrator, that is, where as an illustrator I create fantastic situations with the aim of making them credible and coherent with a totally imaginary world, in painting I rely on images which, although real, blur the boundary between the credible and the incredible. In this way I try to highlight, through images, a public culture that is slowly but surely depriving itself of opportunities to dress up and participate in the realm of the carnivalesque by accepting the repression and disappearance of mocking rituals and carnivalesque liminality, linked to "a certain human instinct to playfully overthrow the dominant orders" (Ehrenreich).
Cycloves
The “Cycloves” project was born as a reaction to a photography book entitled “Loving”, published in the United States in 2020. This book is a collection of photographs of couples of homosexual lovers dating back to the first half of the 20th century, found in flea markets by the authors of the book, themselves a couple of homosexual spouses living in New York. When I first came across this book I had already begun a long journey of searching for black and white portrait photos from the last century. In the shots collected and selected by the authors of the book Loving I found, together with the fascination for the purely aesthetic part of those images and the characters portrayed, a substrate of information that made that collection particularly significant and close to my "Family Lexicon" project (see my website). My interest in the photographs that I researched and selected for my paintings arose from an interest that I would define as halfway between the nostalgic and the anthropological, that is, how in every single photograph the different layers of the cultural, social and intimate heritage of both the people portrayed and the society and historical context in which that shot/moment was frozen can resurface. The photos of gay couples date back to a time when being homosexual in the United States was considered "forbidden" as it was illegal, and the punishment for violators included years in prison. The two authors of the book therefore realized that for each of those photographs to reach their hands, through a shop or an antiques market, they had to go through and survive many "steps" of illegality, from the two lovers who exposed themselves to the lens, to the photographer who agreed to portray them, and then to develop the negative and print it, to who then decided not to throw away the photo and perhaps keep it for many years in a family album etc.: so many steps that we forget today because carried out in the context of legality, they had then been accepted despite the risk of prison. As a corollary to these very pregnant images, the two authors also carried out a biographical investigation of some of the subjects portrayed, or of relatives and acquaintances who could add other information regarding the events of the two lovers portrayed. When I started painting these images, I felt the need to unite the faces of the two lovers, I presume inspired by the intensity of their gazes which conveyed this urgency. The first attempt was very spontaneous, but in destroying the two faces to recompose a third I had to accept that this intervention would not guarantee me a result that was aesthetically better than the starting point. The starting point (the photo of the two lovers) is in itself "perfect", there is no point in trying to improve it. But I am interested in the possibility, offered by oil painting, to get to a result that I cannot foresee when I begin the superposition and union of the two lovers.