My work is an ongoing investigation about the spatial phenomenon in painting. It's about how we can explore spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions and that are simultaneously physical and mental in painting. It is based on Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia. Particularly his analysis of the cemetery as a space of death but also of transformation, a sort of portal to another space. It has to do with spaces that have more layers of meaning and more relationships to other spaces than immediately meet the eye. It is known that the spatial relations in humans develop on two levels: the perceptual level, that gives us the "sense" of space, and the intellectual level, that gives us the "idea" of space. The first is a product of haptic development and the latter is a development of symbolic activity through speech and image. I'm interested in the potential of this fundamental association between the image and the imagination, the invisible contemplated within the visible that is claimed to underpin contemporary understanding of the nature of images. I want the abstract pictorial spaces of my paintings to offer an invitation to meditation on other spaces. The palette and the gestural are related with the representation of my individual emotions, feelings, desires and impulses. I can say that they are the expression of my subjectivity within the pictorial space of the canvas.
In the last decades the circulation of photographs of corpses in the sea, featured by mainstream media, spread faster on social networks becoming iconic. The power accrued by these images testifies to a new regime of visuality. The unprecedented degree of mobilization of people responding to the climate change and the refugee crisis is a direct effect of these images. I have filtered all these images as images of death and urgency. The sea is becoming the ultimate cemetery - a highly heterotopian place.
In the paintings of the series “Lotus Flower” the canvas was the outlet for the emotions triggered in me by the catastrophic images of climate change that have been circulating the media. Images like the oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, the earthquakes in Italy, the wildfires in California, the floods in Japan, the deforestation in the Amazon, the war and the refugee crisis greatly impact me because I see art intrinsically connected to life, space, time and memory.
