"THE SWIMMER" Print

I am Alessandro Piras, a self-taught painter. I began painting as a teenager, almost out of necessity — a way to move through difficult moments, to give shape to something that words could not contain. I stopped for years. I built a career as a graphic designer and illustrator, work I love but that unfolds on commission — within the boundaries of others' visions. Toward the end of the 2000s, I felt the need to return to making images for myself alone. From that freedom, my current painting practice was born. My work moves between two opposite poles: the explosive energy of gesture, color as physical force — and silence, light, contemplation. These are not contradictions: they are two faces of the same search. In the chaotic paintings, I set myself free. In the quiet ones, I find myself again. I draw from contemporary images — video, cinema, advertising — but also from German Romanticism and its capacity to transform nature into something transcendent. What unifies all my work is the primal need to paint — not as a craft, but as a way of living. RUSH is my body of work dedicated to sport — racehorses, greyhounds, football, American football. I did not paint these subjects because I love sport. I painted them because sport is color. It is pure movement. It is the body exceeding itself. The gesture is fast, physical, sometimes chaotic — close to action painting, to that tradition in which the process itself becomes the meaning. Color arrives before thought. The image emerges from force, not from control. Contemporary visual culture — sports broadcasts, advertising, video — is my iconographic reservoir. But the final form is never documentary: it is expressive, amplified, almost abstract in its gesture. If STILL AXIS is the place of silence, RUSH is the place of the shout. Both are necessary. Both are mine. BODY OF WATER is my body of work dedicated to swimming and the underwater world. For years I have been developing a pictorial exploration where blue takes center stage — guided by a profound love for water, for the sensation of lightness and rebirth it conveys. The wonder, the sense of freedom, the perception of flying within the fluid: these are the forces that have shaped this work. Bodies in motion — male and female — merge with the water in energetic and gestural brushstrokes that celebrate underwater beauty as a return to origins. Water is an energetic field: a place of rebirth, weightlessness, transfiguration.