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I Create Miniature Incendiary Bombs of Art

I explore the very core of our shared humanity

I paint my images with kindness and love, the small formats draw the viewer toward the artwork just as a fly trapper plant seduces its prey;  and then, the spectator is left with no alternative, the painting is a trap, the bomb explodes


I call them tragicomic paintings

What the viewer experiences subsequently is contradictory

With treachery, advantage and premeditation I manage to transform an entire set of paintings into small sophisticated traps with which I seek to captivate the viewers, confront and challenge them,  making them travel irremissibly through an unexpected esthetic experience

For me, the mission of art is to transform,  not to flatter from a position of comfort. If I manage to touch a soul, a conscience, a mind, my work acquires validity.

My paintings are intimate like those lockets in which they kept the portrait of the loved one, a lock of hair, a love letter. The intention of my work is to make the observer come closer to discovering the fine detail -and once near,  he or she will remain captive.

The main goal of my tragicomic paintings is to reach people’s consciousnesses by provoking a critical thinking process, searching for their reactions as a total being- neither pure sensibility, nor pure reason.

The content of my work is based on reality and the paintings confront today's troubled and incredible times.

Using black humor and sarcasm I talk about politics, violence, racism, injustice, corruption, life and death, virtue and vice, love and hate, religion, discrimination, solitude, identity and sexuality.

I open the key to the imagination

Leading the adult to the territories of children's fantasy

For each painting I use verses with a cryptic nuance. Images and words weave an enigmatic world with a suprareal character. The elements in each painting become symbols, archetypes of our collective unconscious.

In my paintings, there are layers of meaning in which each character acts in various directions. I paint real, mythological, historical, archetypal and fantastical characters.

My task is to observe the world around me and then translate this image of the world by transforming it into a world of  images.  I better understand my interior world  by carefully  observing the outer world,  and vice-versa,  I better understand the world around me via careful self observation.

Although an art work may seem to be an artist's individualistic vision of reality, it reaches beyond itself and touches any spectator willing to elaborate or challenge their own individual vision of reality.

To provoke emotional reactions and thoughts is my goal.

Painting for me is a necessity.

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQs

There are some issues that I am frequently asked

My art has been associated with many schools : Surrealism, Magic Realism, Baroque, Romanticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Etc.

I have effectively found characteristics that are consistent with many of these artistic trends but I cannot define my painting by labeling it as an absolute follower of any.

I paint portraits of reality converted into fantastical, theatrical scenes.

No matter the format in which I am working, whether miniatures or not, my painting is full of tiny details, microscopic worlds and microcosms  in which I always work with the same miniaturist eye, taking care of every last detail. In these painted spaces more than one story is told, just as a human being’s life is, never a simple story but many layers of action and meaning happening at the same time.

My answer is: my whole life.

Being an artist is not a 9 to 5 job. One is an artist every hour of the day.

Each painting summarizes my entire history, my endless stories.

Egg tempera is a form of paint that is created by mixing egg yolk with powdered pigments and a little water.  Traditionally, tempera was applied to wooden panels, such as poplar, coated with gesso.

When I started my career as a painter I experimented with the techniques I had learned at my Graphic Design studies. I began my practice by using oil colors, acrylics and water colors.

A peer of mine suggested -  based on my inclination for the obsessive details and brush strokes in my work- to try egg tempera, a perfect media that could help me achieve those characteristics; for that reason he recommend me to read and study “Il libro dell’arte” by Cennino Cenninni , a 15th century Italian painter.

In this amazing book, I found step by step the detailed instructions for painting using egg tempera, as well as information about pigments, brushes, panel preparation and much more.

The 15th century author became my best teacher; egg tempera has been my preferred technique for the last 25 years.

I prepare my own colors and I like to think that adding organic matter to the pigments like magic adds life to my paintings.

Egg tempera is not a very popular medium nowadays as it takes time to prepare the paintings and requires precision and dedication; it is not suitable for immediate results.

Painting with egg tempera is a challenge.  It is a painstaking process and it is almost impossible to erase a mistake. Since it is a transparent medium, one has to paint layer by layer, almost as if one were “weaving” a painting, until reaching the final result: a velvety rich colored surface

Using this ancient technique allows me to conjugate the teachings of the past masters with contemporary themes.  As egg tempera requires being patient and adding layers and layers of paint, it gives me the opportunity to indulge myself in conversation with the characters I am creating, and in deep thought about what they are saying.

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Everything I read, listen too, dream, see and imagine is a source of inspiration

Authors like Andersen, Grimm, Hoffman, Perrault ,Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Shakespeare, Zola, Lispector, Lobo Antunes, Steinbeck and many others have been indispensable in shaping the way I perceive life and in giving me the means to translate human issues into images.

In the same way literature has taught me so much about humanity, there are also some visual artists that have been a strong influence in my development as a painter, my style and the way I perceive the world that surrounds me and the one inside myself: Leonardo Da Vinci, Bosch, Brueghel, Caravaggio, Goya, Ensor, Freud, Paula Rego, Remedios Varo are some of the many artists I profoundly admire, both for the technical mastery  and also for their unique vision of their world.

Size doesn’t really matter in a work of art, what really matters are the scale of the impact or the impression left on the observers.

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