Nigredo Painting

My wish was to learn painting as it was taught in the workshops of 15th and 16th centuries. With this thought in my heart I enrolled the Fine Art Academy in Naples in year 2000. My passion for drawing and painting is deeply rooted first into my luck of being born in a stimulating family context. Shelves full with books and comic books, a little workshop where my maternal grandfather Mario practiced his ability as do-it-yourself craftsman, my father Andrea who loved painting, my brothers often drawing, and, last but not least, travelling throughout Italy with my whole family. It is during one of these travels that, at the age of 5, I find myself astonished before the genius of Michelangelo. The wonderful and touching show offered by the Sistine Chapel is like an imprinting to me. Since then on, the magical word of art has opened me its doors. The wish to approach painting with the same love as that of the great masters of the past leads me to the Fine Arts Academy, a place that I imagines to be a modern factory where art is taught according to old techniques. But I soon realize that reality is quite different. So, disappointed, I decide to follow my own course of studies and learn art as an autodidact, by searching for texts, devoting years to experimenting techniques and materials, up to re-discovering the painting of the past centuries. In a certain way, we owe the birth of In Form of Art to my disappointment for attending the Academy: my will to convey the enthusiasm, the freedom, the methods that me myself first absorbed. My research has a philosophical foundation, the knowledge of oneself, a knowledge that implied for the artist a long individual path with many difficulties, but that certainly represents the cornerstone of the In Form of Art's project. Didactics is just an external reflex of the journey towards the knowledge of oneself and the world, it is the tool by which such knowledge is expressed on canvas, but at the same time it is a deep knowledge of techniques without which the artist cannot think of being fully aware of what he/she does. I maintain that the craft’s philosophy cannot be taught. My activity, is a maieutic activity, and I help my students by giving them the appropriate tools to take out, to ‘give birth’ to their own philosophy of art spontaneously.