"Ritratto" Painting

I am Loredana Campa, an artist born in Southern Italy, a land where light shapes memory and turns the landscape into an inner horizon. That light marked the beginning of my path, later refined at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where I graduated in Painting in the early 1990s. Over time, I wove Graphic Design and Editorial Illustration into my practice, as if each discipline were a different way of listening to what vibrates beneath the surface of things.

I have painted for as long as I can remember, and since the early 2000s I have shared my work through exhibitions, competitions, group shows, and solo projects. My themes emerge from quiet encounters: a face, a figure, a rural or urban landscape that, for a moment, holds my gaze. From that fragment, a series takes shape — a path, a dialogue. Photography often accompanies this process: sometimes as a note, sometimes as a presence within the work, sometimes as the spark that ignites an entire cycle.

What I seek in my paintings is essence. Not reduction, but opening — a passage toward interiority. From this pursuit came the series "Interni", an invitation to linger in a suspended, evocative space where what is not immediately visible becomes the most truthful part.

I work with the palette knife — even large ones, when the gesture requires it — alongside the brush, allowing the material to build surfaces that are alive, layered, in motion. I mainly paint in oil on canvas, though I continue to explore different materials. I am drawn to large formats: I believe the scale of a work is part of its breath, as in the "Orizzonti" series, composed of wide canvases that welcome the gaze and return a slower sense of time.

I paint to create places. Places where one can pause, recognize oneself, or get lost for a moment. Places where the image becomes a passage toward what, within us, asks to be seen.