Faith Painting

Born in 1967 in Naples, Italy.I began very young to work with clay and colours, but I felt intimidated by all my relatives' abilities.Until I moved to New York in '99. My life with all its points of reference had totally changed. There was nothing around me that I could recognize, the roads, the neighbours, the rules not written, the role in company, everything, everything was just new. The bread, the money, the check with which I could buy a chewing gum pack, or the doorman that opened the door for me. Even the fact that no one could succeed in pronouncing my name. An inner ferment, a volcano boiling... I needed to express it in a world that did not need translations, where languages and cultures overlapped and mingled within me. In Italy I was the American, in America I was the Italian. I felt my emotions running too fast and even if I succeeded to express them, there was nobody who wanted to hear them. In that culture everything had to be cool and perfect. Smiling, smiling, stopping the difficulties from showing out, the confusion, the astonishment. The distance... the pain, or nostalgia of the colours of the sea and the sun of my land. The emotions I felt found space on the canvasses that remain dumb to listen to. I started recycling materials: where I worked, they threw away litres and litres of enamels (the ones for nails) of every colour. The idea therefore was to find new uses, for them as for me, an anticipatory metaphor of what I would have done with my life. I used as supports spools for threads, electrical workers, Plexiglass tubes, doors. Finally, after two years in USA, I come back to Italy, to Rome, in a house with an open view on the Garbatella neighbour, without regrets. At least not for what I could see from my window. I kept on experimenting new techniques, privileging the contact with the picture and in the picture. My paint-brushes are my hands and my fingers, my paintings are intentionally kinaesthetic, visual and tactile. My feelings became signs, images to caress and to pick up through the tact. Emotions on canvass, shapes for emotion.