On-Off Painting

I am an artist and a professional set designer. I was born and raised in Milan, Italy, and have been living in Brussels, Belgium since 2005. My professional experience as a set designer began in the eighties. For more than twenty years I worked for television, cinema, advertising, fashion events and promotional displays. Since 2008 I have chosen painting as the laboratory for my technical and aesthetic research, after a creative and artistic journey through multiple forms and expressive disciplines. Today I paint with a brush applying the technique of flat backgrounds. Strictly flat colour painting is a constitutive part of my language: a painting that is not interested in perspective, depth or shadows. The composition is a reminiscent of silkscreen printing in its decorative qualities based on the sign applied directly to the matrix. However, my procedure is different: I start from the matrix (the backgrounds), I elaborate its graphic qualities through the sign, I keep the traces of the working on the support. On the canvas, chiaroscuro and nuances are eliminated and shadows are simplified, merged, amalgamated and condensed into backgrounds that fit together like pieces of a puzzle. The tonal gradations are distributed in a succession of monochrome fields, from whose position depends a new type of depth. The chromatic scale is limited on the whites and greys, which are combined with references to the real colour of the subject. A clean composition, poised on the boundary of formal abstraction. Trains and trams are, from the start, the protagonists of my painting. I wanted and want to narrate them in the "memory" and at the same time make them protagonists of a story in time. They are fragments of narratives that were complete but whose beginning and end have been lost, single frames of a film, stories that stop in a temporal suspension that is both reflection and nostalgia. The result is a silent world that speaks without a voice. My trains and trams become portraits of the protagonists, interpreters of a story depicting a moment in time. The viewer adds the narration.