Michela Marchese

I paint what stays with me.
A memory. A feeling. A person. A moment that I cannot quite let go of.
Painting is my way of giving shape to things that are difficult to express with words. I rarely begin with a precise image in mind. Instead, I start from an emotion or a memory and let the painting evolve intuitively through color, movement and texture.
My work is deeply personal, but I don't want my paintings to tell a single, fixed story. A painting that was born from my experience can, hopefully, become something entirely different in someone else's eyes.
I am particularly drawn to the tension between what we feel and what we are able to express — between intimacy and distance, connection and solitude, holding on and letting go.

I am a self-taught artist, originally from Sicily and currently based in Belgium. I paint alongside my professional life, and for me this makes painting even more precious: it is a space where I can slow down, observe what I feel, and turn something intangible into something I can see.
Each painting is, in some way, a fragment of my inner world.
And once it leaves my hands, it becomes part of someone else's.