Osmosi 4 Painting

Architect, Valeria Nuzzo lives and works in Salerno, combining her art practice with her professional life in various fields. Always fascinated by art, she began to study it passionately as a child, and to experiment with its techniques. She was a self-taught, and when, much later, she dealt with children's drawing, she rediscovered in children's graphic gesture the spontaneous expressiveness long sought after by Picasso, Klee, Mirò. Her planning of educational workshops focused on the creative reassembly of modern works of art; this had a powerful impact on her imagination, feeding into the creation of her work. For her PhD in Urban Design at the Federico II University of Naples, she worked on the theme of architectural typology. Subsequently she dealt with children's drawing, examining some crucial questions that it raised. Several books resulted from these interests. She has taught at the University of Salerno. And focusing her attention on teaching through art and about art, she has also created workshops to develop the natural creativity of children, with a constant search into the languages and nature of the creative processes of modern and contemporary art. She currently teaches in secondary schools and conducts graphic-pictorial workshops. Alongside her activity as an architect and teacher, she also produces works on canvas and wood, made with mixed techniques (bitumen, acrylic, oil). She has exhibited in Italy and recently, abroad too, winning first prize at the BIARCO International Biennial (Colombia), virtual section. Her production ranges from abstract and material works to others in which there are allusions to the figurative. In her creations she "leads to reasoning" the shapes and colors, tempering down the apparently random and spontaneous dimension always present in the initial genesis, one which draws on an imaginative and irrational sphere, triggered by the gesture and contact with the materials (wood, sawdust , bitumen, etc…). The suggestion nurtured for the material was fueled not only by her admiration for the works of painters such as Antoni Tàpies or Burri, but by construction sites where, as an architect, she experienced the aesthetic potential of raw materials not yet revealed in a complete form, and also of corroded materials, torn from ruins or from decaying buildings.