WINTER WOODS

WINTER WOODS

Oil on wood panel, 106 x 63 cm, 2015. Original sold.

This painting was inspired by a scene in the movie "Grand Budapest Hotel". The two protagonists are travelling on a train, crossing winter melancholic landscapes, covered by snow and with few leafless trees emerging from it. The scene gives a sense of expectation, and what is dead in it suggests a new beginning.

Little fish

Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 cm. 2006 / 2007

original sold

original sold

original sold

Little dancer

From the series “Small things”. Oil, pencil and charcoal on paper, 30 x 30 cm.

My house is full of little things. An infinity of unnecessary items accumulated over the years, that stay there, without a reason and without a purpose. Sometimes I not even remember where they come from, where I bought them, or who has donated them to me. But now they have achieved a small space, a place above a cabinet, inside a drawer, on a library shelf, or hidden at the bottom of a closet, and they defend that place fiercely, stubbornly. They don’t want to leave, claiming their right to survive, pretending that I feel an affection for them, a bond that simply doesn’t exist. I avenge with these portraits, which reveal their uselessness, their fragility, and the ability that I could, if I really would, to get rid of them all, forever. I want to show their true face, which is inconsistent. They are an empty and weak shell, so that their own shadow is heavier than themselves.

Original available for sale.

www.saatchiart.com/ico71

butterflies and moths

ORIGINALS SOLD.

From the series “Please do not kill butterflies”, pins, oil and pencil on paper, different sizes.              

                                                                                                                                   

Please, all these dead animals ... Of course, not everyone of us can or want become vegetarian. Sure, in some cases, maybe, the medical experimentation needs them to get results. But we really have to kill them for our frivolous activities? ... Is it necessary to have so many pink pigs die in front of a camera? Do we really need to dissect sharks in formaldehyde, to starve stray dogs tied to a chain in the corner of a gallery, or to make innocent ants go crazy in twisted tubes of plexiglass?
To make these drawings, no butterfly was killed.

DIAGRAMS

From the series “Diagram”, pencil and oil on paper, 44 x 50 cm.

In my youth at the school, certain lessons were inevitably boring. When the distraction peered, inadvertently I began to scribble the pages of the books, filling with drawings their blank borders. The hour of history, or philosophy, gave easy ideas: I copied the portraits of philosophers illustrating the beginning of each chapter in the textbook. The math class gave beautiful diagrams: their geometries structured the space, providing backgrounds to fill with decorations, figures, pictures. Maybe it was the insight that those same geometry hid himself a sort of aesthetics, an inexplicable and axiomatic beauty, like when we are aware of it in front of nature, without being able to give it an explanation.

This sort of drawings make me think of a kind of prayer, a repetitive but pleasant action, like the work of an embroiderer, like a spider weaving its web.

Sistine mood

from the series “Sistine mood”, oil on paper, 42 x 29.7 cm, 2015.

http://www.saatchiart.com/art/Drawing-sistine-mood/46606/2662510/view

This series of drawings was inspired by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Some portraits are directly based on the figures painted on the vault. Then I painted other faces trying to reproduce that style, and the characteristics that in my opinion distinguish it: the intense expression of the faces, the light and half transparent colors as if the aim was to let emerge the underlying drawing, the profile marked by a darker line, the background of a mostly uniform sky.

landscape with garbage

 oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm.

I’m afraid that I have never seen in my whole life a place that was totally devoid of garbage or waste. Like the majority of people nowadays, I have traveled quite a lot, and in all the places where I've been, even in apparently pristine landscapes, such as high mountain paths or natural parks, there is always the memory of some garbage. Maybe hidden, perhaps barely visible and half buried, faded by the sun and worn out from the weather, mainly plastic, now part of nature.

In the countryside of southern Italy, especially in Puglia, just digging in the ground it is very easy to uncover relics of ancient Greek civilization: pieces of amphorae, shards of pottery, coins. It's too easy to say that this was a refined civilization, so that we still consider its waste like works of art, while ours is a barbarian society that submerged the planet of trash. Will we arrive at the point of saying that the difference is only quantitative?... Will it happen, in a near future, that we will come to replace the ruins of antiquity with the scraps of our consumerism? Original available for sale:

http://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-landscape-with-garbage/46606/2715756/view