Portrait of "Barbara S." Painting

I was born in Puglia, amidst the light and the sea of Salento—landscapes that nourished my sensibility from childhood. My passion for painting was forged through rigorous self-taught study, a physical dialogue with the medium that led me to choose oil as my primary language. It is a soft, luminous, and patient technique; it has taught me the balance between the instinct of the first brushstroke and slow reflection, until the work itself speaks to me and tells me when to stop. The roots of classical figurative art have evolved into the freedom of the symbol, where the unconscious surfaces upon the canvas. My artistic evolution has been a gradual transition from the aesthetics of form to the aesthetics of feeling. If once my goal was fidelity to reality, today it is fidelity to emotion. In my current works, academic technique merges with dreamlike atmospheres, giving life to subjects that inhabit a suspended time—a constant equilibrium between the solidity of the past and the vertigo of the surreal. My unwavering fascination with the female figure—a mysterious, gentle, and sometimes scandalous creature—remains the beating heart of my work, though it has now shifted toward deeper, more surreal territories. The women I paint no longer belong solely to the present or the past; they dwell on a threshold where the body becomes a symbol and the everyday becomes an enigma beyond time and space. Each work is a hymn to the feminine spirit, understood as a multifaceted universe oscillating between reality and dream.