Klaudia Smith

My work returns repeatedly to the tondo: a format historically associated with wholeness and devotional attention, which I use as a contained world rather than a framed view. The circle does not resolve what is inside it. It holds it.
I paint in acrylic and mixed media, building surfaces with metallic leaf - gold, variegated and silver - that respond to light differently across the day and depending on where the viewer stands. This is not incidental. The instability of the surface is part of the meaning: what is seen is never fixed, and looking is always an act performed under particular conditions.
The work draws on literature as a structural resource rather than illustration. Eliot, Wilde, Cohen, Sartre, these are writers who understood that language breaks down precisely at the moments that matter most, and who built that breakdown into the form of their work. I am interested in the same territory: states of submersion, threshold, endurance. The space between living and not, between coherence and dissolution, between the crack and the light that enters through it.
The figures in my portraits do not perform emotion. They hold their gaze while everything around them is in motion — foliage pressing in, water falling, dark marks mov...

Polytecnic of Milan - Italy