Tell us what you do and your beginnings.

I am an artist based in Sydney, Australia, originally from Budapest, Hungary. My journey began in 2009 as a self-taught artist creating graphite and charcoal portraits. At that time, I was driven purely by curiosity and the desire to understand how emotion and identity can be expressed through the human face.

As my passion grew, I sought formal training and studied life drawing, watercolour, and oil painting at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney, later continuing with concept art studies at CG Master Academy and also completing a diploma in Graphic Design. Over the years, I explored many mediums — from traditional painting to digital art — always searching for the one that felt most aligned with my voice.

From 2010 to 2022, I built the first online drawing education platform in Hungary, sharing knowledge and inspiring a digital community of learners. This experience shaped my understanding of storytelling, communication, and connection.

Eventually, my path led me to glass — a medium that felt both unexpected and deeply personal. I became captivated by the beauty of fractured glass, especially the way it catches and reflects light, creating a subtle sparkle that constantly changes depending on the viewer’s perspective. It allowed me to move beyond representation and into something more expressive, physical, and symbolic.

What does your work aim to say?

My work explores the coexistence of strength and fragility. Qualities that exist within all of us. Glass, as a medium, embodies this contrast perfectly. It is delicate yet resilient, transparent yet powerful, and it mirrors the emotional complexity of the human experience.

Many of my pieces focus on women, identity, and the silent strength carried beneath the surface. I am interested in the stories told through a gaze, a posture, or a moment of stillness. Through the interplay of light, shadow, and texture on glass, I aim to create works that invite reflection and emotional connection.

Ultimately, my art is about resilience, about the beauty that can exist alongside vulnerability. I hope my pieces encourage viewers to pause, feel, and perhaps see parts of themselves within the work.

Where do you find inspiration for your art?

Inspiration comes from people, emotions, and lived experiences. I’m particularly drawn to faces, expressions, and expressive poses — the subtle details that reveal inner worlds. Fashion, photography, and contemporary portraiture have also played a strong role in shaping my visual language.

Beyond visual references, I find inspiration in contrast: fragility and strength, silence and intensity, precision and unpredictability.

Even my background in finance and data science has influenced how I think. It taught me structure, pattern recognition, and discipline — qualities that unexpectedly complement the intuitive nature of my artistic practice.

Often, inspiration arrives quietly. An image, a feeling, or even a fleeting moment can stay with me until it transforms into a piece.

Could you give us some insight into your creative process?

My process begins with an idea or emotional impression rather than a fully formed plan. I spend time studying references and refining the concept, but the actual creation involves a balance between control and surrender.

Working with glass is both physical and meditative. Each mark is intentional, yet the material has its own character. Light becomes an active part of the artwork, constantly changing how the piece is experienced. I build the image gradually, focusing on depth, texture, and the expressive power of the subject.

There is also an analytical side to my approach. I naturally think in layers and structures, carefully considering composition and detail. But at the same time, I allow room for intuition. The process is a dialogue between precision and instinct, between planning and discovery.

What are your future projects?

I am currently focused on expanding my body of work in glass and continuing to refine the language I’ve developed through this medium. I’m interested in exploring new subjects and narratives that push the boundaries of what I’ve done so far.

Additionally, this year I’m planning to create something entirely new — a direction I haven’t explored before. It’s still too early to share details, but I’m hoping to unveil the first piece in the coming months.

Exploring ways to collaborate with brands and businesses, and presenting my work in spaces where light, architecture, and environment can interact with the pieces in meaningful ways, is an important part of my vision.

I’m also interested in exhibiting both nationally and internationally, as I’m drawn to the idea of connecting with audiences across cultures and places. Looking ahead, my goal is to keep evolving, to experiment, take risks, and continue telling stories that resonate on an emotional level.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Agnes Buronyi: Instagram • Website

Some decisions may appear technical, yet carry ethical weight: rhythm, scale, what is shown and what is left out. Speaking from the living as her compass, Lucía Di Pietro leaves us with an open question about the futures we are helping to cultivate.

When Form Shapes the Work

Choosing how to express ourselves is not neutral.

Artists today are more open to working across disciplines beyond those we’ve always known. This expands our poetic horizon and can strengthen the work itself. As an artist, I move between mediums and continue learning what I need along the way. Each space and each tool opens up new worlds.

The way a work takes shape in the world can amplify it. That’s what interests me: how much a piece can grow depending on the language we choose to bring it into being.

A work is read differently depending on its surroundings. The same piece, placed in different contexts, can take on new meanings. Being aware of this helps us decide what we truly want.

Contemporary art no longer revolves solely around hanging a painting on a wall. Building a narrative matters. Artistic practice can become a potential agent of sociocultural transformation.

Video documentation of Lucía Di Pietro performing slow, ritual-like movements inside a sculptural costume, exploring themes of birth and transformation.

The Time of Things

From my perspective, it’s essential to avoid falling into ways of producing that flatten difference. Replicating technological tempos. Making simply to belong.

Producing less, but with greater impact, feels more meaningful.

Allowing the creative process to mature. So that works can unfold in their own time, without being forced.

Singularity matters. When we allow our own truth to surface, what we make gains strength. As a friend often says, approaching the universal through the personal. The identity each work carries nourishes the ground that sustains us, without draining it — or ourselves — in the process.

When proposing a cultural experience, I ask: Who is this for? What questions does it open? What tensions might it reveal? And how accessible is it?

Accessibility concerns how we speak, write, and shape experiences, remaining aware of how close or distant what we produce might feel, and choosing accordingly.

Living as Compass

My work revolves around living processes.

Life reminds us that we belong to rhythms often underestimated. Technological progress has become such a dominant symbol that it can foster dissociation — a split between mind and body that distances us from our living nature. Other perspectives seek integration — embracing these advances while remaining in dialogue with Earth’s wisdom.

Ecosystems regulate themselves.
So do bodies.

Returning to the smallest unit — the cell — becomes, for me, a way of remembering. We are not machines; we are a community of living, sentient, interdependent cells.

Personal health processes led me into this microcosm with curiosity. What I found restored a sense of wonder and reconnection with a mystery that might be called sacred. In parallel, I studied creative practice.

Art became the place I turn to keep deepening that dialogue.

Being Part of the Weave

Plants. Soil. Food systems. Exploitation. Ecosystems. Social organization. These are the grounds from which my questions emerge.

After a decade of activism followed by ten years of artistic production nourished by that experience, my work began to ask broader questions about our destiny as a species and our place within a community of interdependent living beings, entangled with the planet’s elements.

In recent years, my research has turned toward regeneration and possible futures, working at the intersection of scientific inquiry and imagination. I am drawn to what emerges when art reimagines science, and to how alternative approaches might reshape pedagogy. I am interested in unknowing and re-knowing.

It involves engaging uncomfortable questions, loosening crystallized certainties, and approaching what appears as a boundary only to discover countless relationships extending in all directions.

The Question That Remains

Those of us who create carry a particular responsibility: we rehearse futures.

Art plants seeds sometimes quietly, sometimes almost unnoticed. Seeds of curiosity and imagination that, over time, shape how we see and act.

The worlds we inhabit tomorrow begin in the gestures we choose today.

So I ask:

What worlds are we helping grow?

About the Artist

Lucía Di Pietro is an Argentine visual artist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of art, thought, and lived experience. Her projects engage contemporary artistic production through a lens that is both sensitive and rigorous.

Trained in Design (FADU), Body Integration, and Literary Editing, she explores the relationships between body, image, language, and creative process.

She mentors artists through individual guidance and intensive workshops and engages in ongoing curatorial practice, currently collaborating with Abra Cultural Art Gallery and Espacio Bianco.

Her work cultivates spaces of attentive reflection, inviting encounters with materials, processes, and meaning that unfold at their own pace. In her own practice and in the projects she guides, she fosters presence, thoughtful engagement, and a continuous dialogue between creation and life.

Lucía Di Pietro IG | web | YouTube | Linktr.ee

Some artists work on the image, and others who work on the fracture of the image. David Pompili belongs to the latter category. Born in Spoleto in 1970, his career spans scenography, graphics, fashion, painting, and even teaching Art History: not as separate stages, but as layers of a single gaze. Scenography, in particular, has left a decisive mark on him: the idea that each work is a space to be inhabited, a small theater where contemporary art takes center stage.

His language blends pop, street, and allegory, yet eschews decorative surfaces. His works feature logos, brands, advertising fragments, and recycled materials—cardboard, plastic, torn posters—elements that belong to the rapid cycle of consumption and, once freed from their fate, become critical memory. It is here that his gesture becomes more deliberate: transforming waste into narrative.

His distinctive trait, in addition to the sharp and vibrant color contrasts, is polka dots: dots that punctuate surfaces like social cells, serial presences that evoke mass, identity, and multiplicity. Each dot is both individual and systemic. A visual grammar that makes his work instantly recognizable, from urban murals to canvases.

In recent years, his career has intersected with projects that have had a strong public impact: from the work “Ho Creduto a Me” (I Believed in Myself), created in Solarolo (RA) for the museum inaugurated on September 7, 2025 and dedicated to Laura Pausini—inspired by a song from the album “Simili”—to the works for Andrea Bocelli at the Teatro del Silenzio, and even urban and international projects such as intervention in Saint-Ouen, France, for the GemellArte festival. Different experiences, yet united by the same desire: to bring art out of neutrality and into the living flow of society.

In this conversation, we explored the origins of his artistic journey, his relationship with his audience, his dialogue with music, and his gaze toward a future that continues to question the present.

How did your artistic journey begin, and what were the formative stages that most influenced your vision and expressive language?

It all began with my education at the Art School, majoring in Scenography, followed by university and, thanks to formative experiences in the fields of Scenography, Graphic Design, Fashion, and Painting, experiences that led me to define, or perhaps seek, the very identity that set me apart, moving from academic experiences to my style, my provocative, pop-street DNA.

Now I can say that my work remains free because it’s more expressive and naturally recognizable. From a mural to a small piece. Set design has been my fundamental path, a guide, where many different approaches, combined, have succeeded in sparking my interest and curiosity, leading me to achieve what I present today.

Graphic design has always been a constant companion on my journey, a powerful aid and translator of many ideas. In the many years I spent with major fashion brands, I also found that source of inspiration there, in creating and thinking, from the garment to transforming everything into a living installation.

Only later does another side of me emerge, perhaps little known, but one that has shaped my artistic journey for many years: teaching Art History in high school. I have a lot to say, especially about my relationship with my students, engaging in dialogue, listening to generations, and contemporary ideas. For me, it’s an immense wealth and cultural asset.

I often involve my students in my projects, blending my experience with their artistic spontaneity. The result? A veritable design explosion.

Your work blends street art, pop art, and allegory. How did this stylistic synthesis develop over time, and when did you feel you’d found your own recognizable signature?

I’ve been allowing them to coexist for some time now. The bond between them is a thin thread that unites them through social issues, provocation, and society seen through a vividly colored window.

My artistic form was defined many years ago, when I told myself that my art should be enjoyed by everyone. Not because museums or galleries aren’t places for enjoyment, but, for example, I consider the size of a wall an excellent urban canvas for conveying a strong, colorful, and ironic message to everyone.

Your works often address social and contemporary issues. How important is the message to you compared to the visual impact of the work?

It’s very important. I want and hope it will be so that the message will be direct, emotional, and thoughtful, reaching the viewer. Perhaps color and shape also greatly help the viewer, both in murals and in canvas works. Canvas works are strongly linked to logos and society, where time and contemporaneity play their part, revealing the joys and sorrows of our times.

Engaging with the public. You’ve exhibited in a wide variety of contexts, from museums to public spaces. How do you think the perception of your art changes depending on where it’s viewed?

Every exhibition is always different, partly because I always try to present a project in a different and original way, starting with the installation; therefore, the viewer always finds something new in my presentations. The perception of my work can vary from location to location, and it changes with the theme, which is strongly tied to the social message.

You often use recycled materials and mixed techniques. How do you choose these materials, and what role do they play in the symbolic narrative of your works?

The materials I use are scraps or materials that society uses, and where I find a soul, a story, combined with my shapes and colors that create a truly scenic cross-section.

For some time, my torn posters found on the street have become an excellent base for a decollage of logos and writing from my works, where screaming or playful figures take center stage.

Then, the figure is inserted into decorations like polka dots, which, for me, are a metaphorical translation of society seen in every single colored dot. I also find it very interesting to give new life to objects and papers, turning them into works of art. The motto is: reuse and don’t waste, to protect our ecosystem.

“Ho Creduto a Me”, the work created for the Laura Pausini Museum, is a very significant project. What was the concept behind it, and what does it mean to you in your artistic journey?

The title of the work, Ho Creduto a Me, was inspired by a song by Laura (editor’s note: included on the album Simili, 2016; Similares, for the Latin market), which I translated into an image: the two portraits of Laura harmoniously contrast and shield each other with their hands in a strongly protective gesture. It’s always a pleasure to reach the podium in this long artistic journey, and also to find comparison with artists of such international standing.

In this work, you explored the identity of an international music artist. What was it like to explore such a strong and recognizable personal and artistic history?

It was harmoniously beautiful and constructive. It all started with an email, and I won’t deny that at first I was a little anxious. But thanks to Laura’s charisma and her charm, I continued my artistic thinking, ultimately leading to the final realization.

From Laura’s photos, reworked with gray tones, contrasted with bold colors ranging from yellow to fuchsia and red, all defined by polka dots.

During the days spent in Solarolo, a very important and personal aspect was the relationship I built with all the staff and Laura’s family, from her father, Fabrizio, to her sister, Silvia Pausini.

And then the title is very important to me because it also describes other works I created for Andrea Bocelli in Lajatico, at the Teatro del Silenzio, the Open-Air Cinema Museum in Narni in Umbria, the mural dedicated to Luca Tommassini in Rome, the Quartierei Museo project in Bari, and then the sculpture for the Vespa World Days 2024 in Pontedera.

In 2022, I was one of the winners of the 2022 edition of GemellArte, an international contemporary art festival that unites Terni and Saint-Ouen in Paris. For the occasion, I created a mural in Saint-Ouen on the theme of sustainability, entitled “Space Horizon Queen”. Other projects include projects in Cyprus and for the 54th Venice Biennale.

Looking to the future. After your most recent projects and works, what direction do you feel your artistic research is moving in today?

“Intense life, fleeting happiness, and an uncertain future” is a quote from a song by Tonino Carotone. So, an intense life with many future projects and interesting collaborations, some underway and others starting in May in museums.

New murals will appear in various locations across Italy. I can’t say much about them now, but there will also be projects ranging from commercials or logos to fragments of classic works coexisting on a disposable medium.

It’s a new experiment that addresses a current theme: everything is fast-paced and pays little attention to artistic and cultural essence, focusing instead on marketing.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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David Pompili: Instagram • Website

For his new solo exhibition, “Home Truth: Image-Making in Absence”, on view from January 27 to May 23, 2026, at the Lilley Museum of Art (USA), lens-based artist Steven Seidenberg reflects on his practice and the themes at the heart of his most recent research.

For years, Seidenberg has been investigating the material world of the invisible and the marginal: abandoned structures, landscapes marked by historical failures, urban environments suspended between presence and disappearance. This is, however, not a simple focus on the forgotten place, but rather a research that challenges our habitual way of looking.

His images do not seek the spectacular event, but rather focus on what remains after the event has passed, on what continues to exist on the edges of collective perception. In this sense, photography becomes for Seidenberg a critical tool: a device capable of slowing the gaze and removing it from the inertia of everyday seeing.

In “Home Truth”, three bodies of work—from the failed agrarian reform in the Italian countryside to the migrant tent cities of Rome, to the “akiya” and “akichi” of Kanazawa, Japan—intertwine in a visual meditation on absence, memory, and the very idea of ​​”home”.

Different geographical and cultural contexts are brought into dialogue through a common condition: that of spaces bearing the imprint of lives, promises, and interrupted projects. Landscape, architecture, and temporary structures thus become repositories of history, surfaces upon which one can read both the aspirations and fractures of the communities that have passed through them.

Through images almost always devoid of the human figure, the artist constructs a perceptual space that interrogates the viewer, inviting them not only to observe, but to participate in what is missing. Absence is not a decorative void, but a semantic tension: it suggests an off-screen presence, evokes a memory, and makes the viewer aware of their position within the image.

What emerges is a layered reflection on the material conditions of contemporary living and the fragility of the structures—physical and symbolic—that define our sense of belonging.

In this conversation, Seidenberg delves into the reasons for his attraction to marginal spaces, the role of absence in the construction of the image, and the meaning of the concept of “home” today, between anticipated nostalgia and an awareness of precariousness.

Your practice focuses on marginal and often overlooked spaces. What draws you to these places?

Indeed, my practice often focuses on settings and conditions—forms and structures that are otherwise unnoticed, despite their central placement in the scene—and such images help to establish a kind of uncanny distance between the work of the series in which they occur and the perceptual inertia of the viewer.

But even when I’m working in the midst of the quotidian, the goal is to provide that same push against the lethargy of normative seeing, opening the receiver to various conceptual and aesthetic possibilities that would otherwise remain inaccessible.

Your images are almost always devoid of human figures. What kind of presence do you still want to evoke?

Under certain circumstances, this exclusion seems a kind of exile, an evocation of tragic consequences, though this is not always the case. The absence of human form is also, paradoxically, a way of drawing the viewer into the image, of suggesting their place within it, not as observer, but participant.

Such a pose of empathy is impossible to achieve when the human form is present, at best a sight of sympathetic distance, but often enough an objectification of both the persons in the frame and their circumstances, indistinguishable, and thereby understood as in some sense deserved. In this way, I would suggest my images are more human for the deliberate absence of human presence in them, which has the added benefit of foregrounding, if you will, the compositional structure of the piece, otherwise overwhelmed by the central figure of the face.

In “Home Truth”, absence seems central. What can an image reveal through what’s missing?

I feel compelled to first distinguish absence as a compositional structure from absence as a semantic structure. Semantic absence, it must be understood, is the artist’s manufacture of a thwarted expectation, of a presence that diverges from the anticipated frame by virtue of exclusion, even when that exclusion happens by virtue of a view that’s somehow ‘full’.

Compositional absence, achieved by the placement of negative space within the field of view, is sometimes a useful tool in bringing out semantic absence; it’s certainly a tool I use in some of my work—in Home Truth, particularly in the series from Kanazawa, which presents the empty lots and spaces of a depopulating city.

But other absences are structural in different ways: as a framing of historical failure through the unexpected presence, say, of an abandoned housing development in the middle of a wheat field (my series The Architecture of Silence), or the cultural and social exigencies materially expressed in a migrant or unhoused encampment (Baobab). This latter example allows us to feel the presence of those living in the camp just outside the frame, but also their absence from their respective cultural origins, regardless of the proximity—or the facticity—of that imagined fold.

The concept of “home” runs throughout the exhibition. What does it mean to you today?

In the broadest sense—which is to say, beyond the socioeconomic and political implications of the particular scenarios the three series featured in the exhibition manifest—I mean to suggest how the notion of home always bears with it the future of its absence, a prospective nostalgia for its loss. That contemporary cultures conceive of home as stable and stationary is an effect of property relations, not a causal force in the making of those relations.

There is a kind of ecstatic release in realizing the illusory character of our attempts at permanence, an ecstasis that equally puts us into contact with our imminent disappearance, the certainty of our eventual exile from discernment.

In your work on Italian agrarian reform, what spoke to you more: the landscape or its historical memory?

For me, it’s impossible to distinguish the two; the landscape carries the historical memory, and is entirely structured by it. Certainly, one of the goals of the work—aesthetically and conceptually—is to express that unity, allowing the landscape to speak through the apertures of doors and windows, or by virtue of the incursion of various flora and fauna into interior spaces.

In the process, the landscape becomes the expression of an unrealized future, a retrospectively futile hope stuck in the brutal muddle of modern agricultural yields.

Photographing the migrant camp in Rome, how did your way of observing space change?

One might say that it was narrowed and subordinated to the fragile conditions in which I was working. The modes of timing any particular composition and the process of surrendering myself and my mode of seeing to the spaces I was imaging were necessarily structured around that fragility, focusing on the most basic ways in which a space is marked as the extension of one’s personage, one’s safety (even when one is relatively unsafe) and security (even when one is relatively insecure) and I hope the work in some small way expresses the volatility of those emotional and physical circumstances.

What struck you about the Japanese "akiya" and "akichi" compared to the European places you've photographed?

In many respects, what’s most striking are the material commonalities in the course of deurbanization, across cultures and historic periods. At the same time, the distinctive character of the artifice in any given place and time presents a kind of singularity within the framework of material decline, and that is certainly something I’m aware of in a place like Kanazawa, whose vestiges of a long and remarkable history are unmistakably present in every iteration of development and redevelopment equally.

Nonetheless, the philosopher in me pursues the universal that arises precisely from such considerations of the singular—and this proclivity serves as the expressive voice of my work, across series and platforms.

After this exhibition, what places or themes do you feel you’d like to move toward?

It’s a difficult question to answer, not because I don’t have thoughts on future projects and exhibitions (indeed, the curators of ‘Home Truths’ hope to travel the show, a hope I share), but because I feel the need to resist my inclinations and presumptions about possible photographic futures, in deference to the unique access of lens-based art—and my work in particular—in aleatoric response.

This is not to say I won’t continue to pursue the sorts of projects and series I have in the past, but that it’s impossible for me to faithfully imagine what novel foci and forms of practice will find impetus to expression in my oeuvre or my voice.

Of course, some things have been in the works for a while, like this show and its future iterations, or the photobook of the Kanazawa series due out from Chin Music Press in the fall of this year, but where new series will arise and find an avenue for dissemination is thrillingly unknown, as it always has been and will be.

An example of this—the current show, and the Lilley Museum where it’s showing, will also produce a symposium, bringing together critics, curators, art historians, and artists, in conversation about the work, which will undoubtedly yield novel insights and new directions, both in consideration of previous projects and in future pursuits.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Steven Seidenberg: Instagram • Website

Tell us what you do and your beginnings.

My approach to art was more by chance than by choice. I was supposed to become a dental technician, but for various reasons, I remained attached to art school. The beginnings of my personal work were more of a narrative and introspective figuration, which, when applied to wood, often encountered technical difficulties.

In later years, I attempted to resolve these difficulties with various solutions, drawing closer to the life of the tree itself, attempting to translate them into the body.

So, in short, I’m interested in sculpture and form in space in general; the figure is often a vehicle, less for storytelling than for attempting to connect materiality, form, and memories.

What does your work aim to say?

My work doesn’t seek to narrate, but to remember, or to open different, unexpected doors that draw the viewer into their perception and their world; always prefigured by my intentions.

I don’t like to leave the task of putting things together entirely up to the viewer: I provide a beginning, a direction, but I try to leave enough room for personal interpretation.

In the burned works, for example, I’m interested in the fragility of what remains, of what appears to us, and the personal, primordial memory that lies within us reappears like a mirror that touches us and unleashes questions or emotions.

Similarly, the resins initially recall the putrefaction of a body, but when one manages to connect the resin to the blood of the tree, the reassembling, healing aspect of it appears, bringing us closer to the metamorphosis of sculpture.

Where do you find inspiration for your art?

It’s more like a transition from one work to the next. What I mean is, what didn’t work in the first one, I try to correct in the next sculpture, and so the form, surface, and content slowly change over the years.

But I don’t wake up in the morning with a new idea in my head; that’s a false picture of the artist. I believe that “becoming” is a long process, tied to personal experiences and decisions.

Then everyone makes their own choices and tries to find their place where they believe they belong and where they can best utilize their skills.

Could you give us some insight into your creative process?

It’s hard to summarize in a sentence. I like to get my hands dirty, as they say, and experiment with materials, distorting them and pushing them to their limits—the limits of the type of sculpture—combining ideas with what reflects the visual form.

Experiences like this accumulate and, when things go well, they come together in a single work. Every artist has different origins, approaches, and interests, and each, in their own way, tries to communicate with their audience.

Personally, I’ve always enjoyed using my hands. For a while, I can be abstract, focused on the idea, but then I enjoy experimenting with materials, shaping things, and trying to combine them with tried-and-true experiences.

What are your future projects?

At the end of February, I’ll be opening a solo show at the 104 Gallery in Tokyo, another at the Galleria Anna Marra in Rome, and then in May, an exhibition in honor of Saint Francis at the MAXXI Museum in Rome.

I’m also continuing my work with Veta, an association that supports the creative work of young people, and the Summer Academy Garden, which I lead, as well as various group exhibitions.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Aron Demetz: Instagram • Website

Katya Granova uses historical photography not as testimony, but as a critical terrain for interrogating the past. Born in the final years of the Soviet Union, amid the collapse of its ideological structure, and raised in the 1990s amidst narrative voids, rewritings, and contradictory memories, her research is situated in a space of friction between private memory and collective history, where the photographic image loses its documentary status to become a device of activation.

Her practice is based on the use of photographs dating back to before her birth, including family archives, anonymous images, and ordinary scenes excluded from the monumentality of official history. She intervenes on these surfaces with the pictorial gesture, inserting her body into a time she has not lived. Painting acts neither as restoration nor as commemoration, but as intrusion: a physical presence that alters the image and disrupts its supposed neutrality.

In this process, the gesture becomes an act of appropriation and resistance. Not to photographic reproducibility per se, but to the idea of ​​a linear, objective, and concluded history. Figures, objects, and architecture coexist on the same plane, removed from any visual hierarchy, while pictorial abstraction coexists with the photographic element without being subordinated to it.

Through this constant confrontation between presence and absence, existence and non-existence, Granova’s work questions the way we construct the past and relate to loss. Photography thus becomes a threshold: not a place of truth, but a space of tension in which the contemporary subject can grapple with what has been, without claiming to possess it or correct it.

Your birth at a time of profound historical transition—between the collapse of the USSR and the rewriting of its narratives—has shaped your imagination. When did you realize that this “narrative void” would become the core of your artistic research?

I was actually born even before the USSR collapsed—though at 2.5, I wasn’t exactly filing political commentaries. But nothing collapsed neatly anyway. Soviet narratives didn’t fall; they slowly unravelled, like a very long, very depressing magic trick.

The Russian 90s were a full-blown fever dream: extreme poverty alongside brand-new oligarchs, mafia power alongside emerging spiritual gurus, some queued for Big Macs, some for humanitarian aid. The past was just as unstable as the present. Your grandparents would insist the USSR was paradise (everyone authentic, everything cheap); your parents couldn’t find one good word for it, wholeheartedly embracing their new jungle-style capitalism, state crimes declassified, propaganda lingering, conspiracy theories multiplying like cockroaches in our communal kitchen.

School history books changed often enough that no one bothered keeping up with who the ‘good guys’ were anymore. If the 80s generation learned to live with constant lies and restrictions, mine grew up in narrative chaos—a pile of mismatched fragments posing as history, with nothing solid to stand on, nothing to navigate a young life by.

Would I have realised this was unusual if I’d stayed in Russia, happily simmering in the soup of my generation? Of course not. Only after living abroad and meeting people whose childhoods weren’t Yury-Gagarin-meets-Looney-Tunes did I understand how deeply this atmosphere shaped my entire operating system, and, therefore, my art. History is never truly objective anywhere, but my experience made me acutely aware of that - and paradoxically hungry for something solid in the past, however impossible to find.

I discovered my family’s old photographs almost by accident. No one ever introduced them to me, and I found them only when sorting through my grandfather’s office after he passed away. Incorporating them into my practice, I realised that I became unprecedentedly expressive when painting over their enlarged copies. These photographs became a bridge between my personal past and a larger historical consciousness.

Later, I started working with flea-market and archival photographs as well. The same quality unites them: too ordinary to have been staged, too banal to bother faking, they feel like the most trustworthy crumbs of the real, objective past. Stories get rewritten, memories fade and warp, no testimony stays stable—but these do. So working on them becomes a speculative act of reclaiming agency: rebelling against imposed narratives and against the past’s inevitable subjectivity.

You often work with photographs found in flea markets or from your family archive. How do you choose an image to rework? What draws you to one visual fragment over another?

There are a few criteria. First, the photograph has to predate my birth—it must contain a past I couldn’t possibly witness. It also has to feature ordinary people in everyday situations. Famous faces and historic moments already have enough visibility, and I’m drawn to what history tossed aside, the moments that ended up in flea-market bins or at the bottom of someone’s drawer.

Then there must be some emotional connection—perhaps it’s my family, and I miss those people, perhaps the scene resonates with my own experience, perhaps I’m drawn to that particular time or place.

There must be people. I’m an ex-psychologist, and inevitably, everything I care about revolves around human existence, for better or worse. Which means: absolutely no landscapes. But no grand solo portraits either. A single face often acts like a narcissist, dragging all the attention to itself. I need at least two people, preferably three or more, and some objects, or a building, so the eye can roam the whole scene and not get trapped psychoanalysing one person. Everything matters equally; they’ve all vanished into the same past, so why should one face dominate over a doorway or a shoe?

I prefer scenes where people are caught in a moment of action rather than posing, though those are hard to find. And the photographs must be black and white. I choose the colours, not the camera. That’s where I bring myself into the scene.

You often talk about the “imprint of your body” within the image. Do you think of gesture as a form of reparation, rebellion, or reappropriation of the past?

Rebellion and reappropriation, yes. Reparation, no. I’m not a conservator with tweezers and noble intentions. I’m taking these moments and making them partly mine, forcing my way in uninvited. Gesture is my tool for breaking in, if you like. By ‘gesture’ I mean the movement of the hand that produces a brushstroke. The qualities of that stroke—its speed, pressure, rhythm, and character—are dictated by who I am, how I feel, and what I am craving at that moment.

This bodily trace becomes a kind of prolonged presence. A brushstroke can outlive the person who made it for many centuries. Take Faiyum mummy portraits: their artists have been dust for two millennia, yet their gestures remain fully alive. If that’s not rebellion against our linearity of time, I don’t know what is.

I use this quality deliberately, but extend it further by inserting it into a transferred photograph. The projection, cyanotype, or printed image becomes a portal that lets me step into a past I never lived in. This is how my bodily presence intrudes into the photograph.

The first time I painted over a printed photograph, the reaction was shockingly intense, far more intense than when I paint the model or something from my head. I believe I understand why: my particular upbringing and further life in Russia left me with a complicated relationship with the past itself and developed my particular rage at the ways history is manipulated by power, often resulting in wars and other manipulations, as well as frustration at how ordinary lives fade away.

Each brushstroke becomes a small act of vandalism against official forgetting, a rebellion against linearity, and at the same time a strange form of care for the people who have slipped into obscurity in an effort to get them back.

In your paintings, the image coexists with an area of ​​photographic abstraction. To what extent do you feel free to “lie” to the photograph while remaining faithful to the emotional truth it contains?

I’d argue that painterly abstraction coexists with the photographic image, not the other way around. But honestly, I’m not particularly worried about ‘lying’ to the photograph because I’m not trying to capture its ‘emotional truth’. I don’t know it; I wasn’t there. The photograph isn’t a sacred text; it works only as a trigger for a particular response from a particular body with a particular experience. I simply follow my hand and impulses wherever they lead. Sometimes a face gets lost in a blur of gesture while a shoe stays sharp. Sometimes entire sections dissolve into colour while other parts remain recognizable.

But it is important how honest I am in the moment of painting, that I’m not trying to impress anyone, show anything or follow trends. What I want to leave on the canvas is my rage, my confusion, my rebellion, my doubts, my sadness, all distilled in each brushstroke. How do I really exist in front of this photograph? What does it do to me? My task is to deal with myself and pursue my own truth and authenticity. What viewers make of that, whether it matches their reading, is none of my business. I’m not their Soviet grandma who knows better how they should feel. I believe communication between artwork and viewer is their own intimate process, and the artist should get away and give the work freedom to speak for itself.

Your work intertwines personal memory and collective history. Do you feel more like an author, custodian, or translator of the images you manipulate?

Author, custodian, or translator all feel like serious adult professional roles, and my painting is, on the contrary, a rather playful and energetic activity. I’d rather compare myself to a dog who likes to bark and jump around but is too well-trained to do it without the right trigger. My inner dog was deeply affected by fake history and an unapproachable past, so bringing her an enormous, enlarged photograph pulls the trigger and allows her to forget manners and do her best and most musical barks.

I keep my collection of photographs carefully, as little treasures from moments of someone’s precious life. But in my art practice, I use them solely as a tool to enter the painting situation. Painting is a completely absurd activity if you think about it: the world is burning, and you are here, smearing coloured slime on stretched fabric, right? Yet when you fully immerse yourself in the process, you can discover the most magical things: the tipsy feeling of freedom and touch of infinity, full dissolution of self and unrestrained self-expression.

Each time I’m there, I’m impressed. From the perspective of an everyday rational mind, it’s hard to believe that by doing this silly thing you can communicate all your life experience and all your gathered bits of wisdom, your mistakes and uncertainties, your weaknesses and powers, your temporality and timelessness. And the photograph triggers this response, getting me into these occasionally magical states of painting.

I often compare painting to sex, especially from the female side. In sex, you’re doing these petty, ridiculous movements, yet they can carry you into entirely otherworldly states of mind. You may desperately want those states, but you can’t just decide to have them; you need to get sufficiently excited first. People employ foreplay, rituals, kinks, whatever creates the right conditions. Same with painting. For reasons stated above, I am aroused by the inapproachability of the past, so I physically place myself in front of an enlarged old photograph and let it affect me. That’s how I arrive at painting. I can’t just walk into the studio and start. I must create a scene where painting can happen.

But real sex—like real painting— is never just excitement and orgasms. There are insecurities, doubts, awkwardness, and miscommunications. Most of my painting time is also spent on those. But it’s okay, I don’t want to pretend to be some serious, disciplined professional who always knows what she’s doing. Most of the time, I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone truly does.

So if I have to choose the right metaphor for my role in my practice, between being a custodian with a magnifying glass in a dusty archive or someone trying to have sex, I’m definitely the second. Or maybe I’m the barking dog…in fishnets.

What is your relationship with your childhood photographs today, after so many years spent transforming them through painting?

I never used my own childhood photographs; I only use those from before my birth. Generally, I never work with any photographs featuring me. There is more than enough of my presence in my paintings already. Bringing myself into a time when I did not exist lets me touch the ontological questions of existence and non‑existence, or, if injecting some drama, look in the eye of death.

Death is happening in every detail of the photograph, as described in Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. Those people existed then, and I did not. Can one even think of what it is to not exist? Now I am present, and they are gone. I’m curious about the intersection of those two conditions.

Nevertheless, there are some photographs I return to again and again, perhaps because I find them beautiful or intriguing, or due to my emotional ties with the people depicted. Each time I paint them, my relationship with the image deepens. The people in it, whether I knew them in life or not, become more present in my world, almost as if I were having a conversation with them.

This is especially true when working with my family archive. Working over these images allows me to revisit relationships with those I miss. For instance, my grandmother is no longer in the world, but painting over her transferred photographs lets me engage with her, step into moments of her past I could never witness directly, and occasionally argue with her too, in my head. It helps me process grief, honour her memory, appreciate her presence in my life, and maybe outsmart death just a little.

We had some serious conflicts. She certainly didn’t suffer from a shortage of strong opinions. Immersing myself in her past in this way has helped me move from judgment to understanding. In this way, my work sometimes has a strong self-therapeutic dimension, alongside curiosity, rebellion, and moments of playful provocation.

For your participation in the exhibition “Small is Beautiful”, small-format works take on a central role. How does your approach change when you reduce the scale?

When I received the invitation, I thought: what a fantastic chance to reach such a wide audience as at Flowers Gallery, but what can I show? I had never done anything this small in my life! Translating the gestural energy of my two-metre works into canvases no larger than 20–22 cm is quite a challenge. So I got 14 tiny canvases, 13 to 18 cm, and decided to paint them quickly, then choose the strongest pieces.

Large works can take months of despair, endless adjustments, and questioning if the painting is faithful to my sense of truth, but small ones leave no room for that. They either work or they don’t, and you are either delighted or frustrated, nothing in between. The compressed intensity felt like a brief, exhilarating holiday affair: fast, intense, and entirely absorbing. Also, I got more experimental with colours. For big works, I premix my paint in bulk, but here I mixed directly on the palette, more traditionally, which brought me to a greater variety of colours and new discoveries.

The fact that the scale was very close to standard photographic size made my engagement with the photographic world more intimate. I had to make my gestures and presence compatible with the miniature humans from the tiny photograph. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, having to shrink myself to minuscule proportions to fit through a tiny doorway.

I used photographs of my grandparents from the family archive, and the small scale seemed to invite even more tenderness and care, making each gesture feel weightier, more deliberate, more alive.

I would still say I prefer stepping into the portal of a large-scale canvas, where my gestures can roam freely, and the people in the image are more or less my own scale. Yet compressing myself to match these miniature canvases was a curious experience, one that demanded both physical and emotional recalibration.

We live in an era in which the photographic image is infinite and replicable, while your pictorial gesture is unique. Do you see this as an act of resistance to the dispersion of memory?

I think I see it more as a resistance to the existential condition of being human. Yes, photography is infinitely replicable now, and earlier it was rarer and more valued, but even then, history was never objective, death was never optional, and time flowed indifferently to our aspirations and desires. I am curious about more eternal issues than the question of photographic reproducibility, or even photography itself.

I don’t think the contemporary situation with memory, kept in photographs, is necessarily worse than before, at least if you can ignore the endless parade of cats and babies. With the developments in archaeology, data analysis, and history, there is far more information about the past, and it’s more accessible; plus ordinary, non-famous people can now share their experiences to potentially unlimited audiences. But there are also far more ways to distort that information, such as Photoshop, AI, deepfakes and the internet’s favourite pastime, conspiracy theories. I think, overall, the balance of truth and lies in history hasn’t really changed.

So I’d rather worry about something a bit more timeless—I’d hate to fall out of fashion if something happens to the infinite replicability of the photograph!

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Katya Granova: Instagram • Website

Rob Mango’s work stems from a primal need, far removed from systems and repetition. His research encompasses painting, sculpture, and three-dimensional construction as a territory of constant reinvention, where each work is the product of risk, doubt, and desire.

Having arrived in New York in 1977, Mango developed his own language in a profound dialogue with the city, both muse and mirror of an education in the roughest downtown, marked by crucial encounters—artists, musicians, intellectuals—and the fracture of September 11th, an experience that transformed destruction and memory into pictorial matter.

For Mango, vision always precedes technique. Guided by an instinctive impulse—his inner fifteen-year-old—the artist approaches the canvas as an open space, where control and abandon, rationality and absurdity coexist.

His figures, ranging from jesters, deities, and archetypes, inhabit a personal mythology in which the mask becomes a tool of knowledge. Also crucial to his career is the experience of the Neo Persona Gallery, the birthplace of the Jester, his alter ego and key figure in his research.

In this interview, Rob Mango retraces nearly fifty years of work, reflecting on cities, vision, matter, myth, and desire, and on the value of the encounters that have accompanied and fueled his journey, painting a portrait of an artist for whom art remains an act of absolute freedom.

When you look back at the different eras, struggles, and breakthroughs in your studio, how has the simultaneous evolution of New York City influenced or mirrored them, and do they inform you as to what comes next? Do you favor a certain period because of critical acclaim, commercial impact, or something else?

As a kid, I grew up thinking that arts and culture superheroes were all from New York City. It was a living, breathing, metaphorical entity inside me. I knew I had to get there, and I did, in 1977. It was inevitable that New York would become a muse. It was in some way a mirror as well as a looking glass I fell through. What I found and experienced there I embedded in the paintings.

I developed—as a person and artist—with the city: working in construction, or as a nightwatchman to scratch by when downtown was gritty and untamed, and Tribeca didn’t yet have its name. From my loft, I took part in the formation of the artistic community and neighborhood, the development of downtown, hobnobbed with movers and shakers during the Wall Street boom years, and witnessed the evolution of the city and the vagaries of the art business within it over decades.

Anyone who’s called the city home since before 2000 was irrevocably altered or influenced by the most momentous occurrence in New York: 9/11. It changed the landscape, physically and psychologically, in ways too profound to enumerate. Being six blocks from ground zero, experiencing the fallout and the gruesome aftermath, I couldn’t pick up a paintbrush. Over two years later, whether catharsis or exorcism of the collateral damage, human and otherwise, I finally painted Burial at Sea and then Fallen Towers.

As the Trade Center site was being rebuilt, I experienced a personal renaissance in which every version of a state of mind was alive in the paintings. Living in the rubble of destruction for so many months, the transitory nature of life, ephemeral and physical, broke down layers of my psyche, and deconstruction took over my being. Came through in the paintings. When I drew too representationally, I’d think, “Who am I kidding? It won’t last.” There have been so many tandem shifts like that between the city and my art.

Where I’ve been and what I’ve done have informed my current work, but it’s always changing. Not just era to era but day to day. New York is like that, too. I’m someone who constantly reinvents myself. Pushing myself to do something I’ve never done before, and unsure how to execute. But all that’s come before is active in me technically, forever. That’s reflected in the full scope of almost five decades of work. I’ve never turned my head from New York. She’s always lurking in my subconscious.

I don’t usually think in terms of recognition or acclaim within the commercial machine. It’s only ever about what I’m alchemizing and imagining at a given time. I’ve often been asked what my favorite period is. The 1977 – 1980 scene in my studio after I first arrived in New York was a raw, electric, perfect storm of instinctual invention in the zone between sculpture, engineered 3D construction, beautiful drawing and paint handling, and theater. I unleashed myself. My nightly high-octane runs through an undeveloped downtown, and the creative alchemy that took place in that oxygen-deprived state showed up in the work in unexpected ways, and I completely gave myself to that exploration. All that’s come after still carries reflections of this period in some way.

What themes are most pressing in your current practice, and what are you working on now?

I don’t feel the term “practice” really applies to me. I function based on passion. To utilize the desire for fuel. There is no known blueprint or map with instructions for how to get there. It’s challenging and keeps me in a state of perpetual doubt until the work is finished. As for the theme, one of the underlying drivers is how events in the future are altering the present. In the process of visioning and creating, I’m there, in the future, instructing myself how to do this painting. I narrate it for my “past” self, then go back and execute it. Someone can look at a given period and list themes they see, but when I’m working, I don’t have target themes at all. I turned my back on yesterday completely.

I’m not repeating. My now is always my future in this way. It’s my seminal artistic self, the 15-year-old kid in me calling the shots. The fundamental me. Here I am, seventy-four, and still just a puppet for this kid and his drive to discover who he is.

The two paintings he’s asking me to make now are so difficult. Elements I’m being shown and asked to employ are entirely new. I have to figure out how to achieve what I’m envisioning. One includes painting on raw linen, with no underlying gesso layer. I’ve never tried that. Other aspects are asking me to invent methods to bring them into concrete expression, which calls on my innate identity as an inventor. It also means that I’m swimming in a sea of doubt the whole way as I grapple with the challenges one by one, never sure a piece is going to be successful until the very end.

When you look at a blank canvas, what do you see? And what role does mystery play in your visual narratives?

At the point at which I’m standing in front of a canvas to make the painting, it will be naked, and I’ll be naked, and nothing that came before can really help me now. I must be completely present and at my very best as I confront the void. I’m surrounded by hundreds of tubes of oil paint and hundreds of brushes; every brush I’ve ever painted with is cleaned and stored in plastic pouches. I’m armed with the ability to create every color in the spectrum of light.

All the visioning and preliminary sketching that’s led up to this are standing by and ignored. I’m suspended in the energetic field with all the threads of the narrative in my hands. Maybe the brain is just a receptor, and consciousness is a thing that exists universally in space and time. So, I can be this old guy standing there and have this painting resonating in my head, this vision which is dictated by my 15-year-old self. It’s not the process of an aged person.

It’s just this moment in time, and no part of my past is welcome in this picture. The only thing in me is talent. When you’ve painted and drawn and sculpted and built and motorized neon as much as I have, my fingers and my hands, the part of my brain that makes things will just electrically come into play, and I’m going to do it. And I’m going to be terrified. Filled with doubt. On the day that I launch, I’m just there, with canvas and vision, asking myself how to accomplish it, how do I start?

Mystery is a term for those on the outside looking in. I don’t look at a thing as being “unknown.” It’s just something I have to figure out how to do. Sometimes I just want to bring a vision to life so badly. I give it a visceral quality, enable it with a sense of realism, and what I’m bringing to life is something that has never existed. On the artist’s side, mystery isn’t a thing unto itself; it’s a function of inviting genius to act through me to create something great. I have to be all in, completely present to the moment, whatever it is: doubt, fear, dissatisfaction with what came before and what’s around me now. That’s when my mind spits out something completely new.

Why do you insist on not systematizing your thought process and artistic output? What do you have against simply finding a specific comfort zone of proficiency and continuing to work within that style?

Systematizing, cutting another piece of bread off the end of the loaf, is pathetic, unimaginative, and commercial. It’s not me. I understand branding and marketing. But if someone looks at my last 250 finished works, they’re going to see something that’s constantly reinvented. If it doesn’t thrill me, I’m going to destroy that picture, I’m going to throw it right out the studio door. And how is it going to thrill me? I’ve got to create something new and appetizingly beautiful. Beauty can enter a picture through so many doorways. Through paint handling, composition, chiaroscuro, line quality, and pure imagination. When a picture is evolving, every mark has to have beauty in it, imparted in the course of the search. If the journey isn’t always new, always searching, I’ll fall into a static sense of self, and then it’s over.

The absurd and the rational belong in the same picture. And a thing can only be absurd if it’s completely and wholly out of context. Duchamp gave us that. Irrationality, by its nature, isn’t something that can be systematized. I believe sanity and insanity blend in the middle. On one end of the spectrum is schizophrenia. On the other hand, complete predictability: science, math, architecture. I embrace them both. My motivation is to stimulate and feed the great minds in the audience. To expand them. That’s the opposite of the aim of systems, which is to homogenize.

The safety of working within one certain style is anathema to the artistic journey. Style comes from a thing being “me.” “This is how I do it.” It’s the ego. And it has such gravity. You have to turn your back on it. You have to resist it. And in resisting it, you’re expanding its capacity. I can learn from so many sources: visually, artistically, literarily, theatrically… because I don’t claim allegiance to any one style or form. I can go back to them all during the visioning process. Then I can cut them out and stand naked in front of the canvas and create because my ego is so enhanced, refreshed, and readied by not having allegiance to the past.

As an artist, I can take how I did things before and deform it, reframe it to make it something new and untried. I don’t want a previous conception of beauty to get in the way of the figure’s role as a muse, or what needs to happen now. The process of invention is through the mind of man, but via the universe, the cosmos, the quantum.

How do the creative visions come? Are they fleeting or lasting? Do you “choose” the materials for your works, or is there a more ephemeral process in which you’re informed but the stream of consciousness?

A vision is a tight assembly of elements that impresses me as being one, not numerous. It’s the life of my mind. That inner kid that’s driving me is so hard to satisfy. He’s also the only person I trust. In the vision comes an intrigue with the material and some deep underlying element that dictates all the others. Appeasing that strongest nucleus of the vision, that’s the game. I just keep rolling forward. Unless there’s something to stop me or slow me down, like a particular art dealer or a commission, then I’ll confine my vision-making machinery to just that. And believe me, it’s such a peaceful, wonderful experience to restrict my mind for a time!

If not, my unconscious is bubbling and forcing elements on me in a constant change and evolution, and that process sure is not safety. And it sure is not style. It’s just foraging in the unknown where the big prize lives. And I locate it with this force, the essence of youth in my consciousness.

When you’re doing something new and difficult, you don’t know the route. You have to invent it, and that means going backward and sideways before you can go forward. The visions are inherently unstable. They want to flee. These ideas are like airplanes circling in my head, looking for a landing strip. I have to find a place for them to land before they disappear.

I bring them down and transform them into graphite on paper. And then, the long, arduous journey of bringing a finished piece to fruition.

In terms of choosing materials, my brain is a builder, a sculptor, but also a draftsman and a painter. There’s always a fork in the road as to whether it’s going to be 2D or 3D. The decision is based on how I most impactfully manifest the vision. I’ve evolved this over twenty-five years nonstop. The whole process is ephemeral because genius is an autonomous energy that moves through artists, not something we are. Inspiration chooses us as the conduit.

Through this lens, the true artist isn’t the architect of the vision; they’re the intermediary between the inspiration and the medium. You have to be able to get yourself out of the way for the magic to happen.

The brain is a receptacle and a translator. I accept what appears. Try to understand and adapt it to my artistry. The pathways are there. It’s like taking the lid off a can of paint. You take the screwdriver and just pry it open, and whoosh, it’s like taking the lid off Pandora’s Box.

How does the intersection between the ancient past and more modern avatars like the jester translate to the “modern mythologies” in so many of your works? You seem to render your human subjects at their best, whether men as time-traveling costumed gods, or women as lithe dancers and nymphs. How is that, in our world so grim?

The truth is, it’s my world, not the world outside the door. And one optimal capability of art is delivering pleasure. Taking you away. I’m an optimist. I try to make women look beautiful. I try to make men look strong and heroic. I’m actually just visiting them in a painting. Assuming a costume cues the viewer that this is the artist, it’s not the subject.

The jester, or demon, or god is an element in a very long-term narrative. A written story can be more concise because you can collapse time and space with words, but in paint you have to illustrate it, and this takes up a certain amount of space in the picture. If it becomes too much, you lose the audience. So, you proceed based on commanding the limitations of your medium.

It’s an evocative experience to surrender to the alternate reality of a historical or mythological archetype. I could end up being informed by it of something I don’t already know. Or bring my consciousness to that past paradigm to see, experience, and understand it in a new way.

It has endless potential. And I’m driven to take that trip over and over because I’m controlled by the suspicion that there’s a hidden truth. I’m trying to find out who the heck I am. Who do I get that answer from?

If I go wearing the skin of an avatar, I’m less inclined to be seen as a miserable human being by the invisible gods I’m approaching, who exist in infinite space. I don’t want to be recognized as simply human when I come into the presence of the gods. I’m more likely to be gifted with divine truths if I’ve elevated myself beyond normal human limitations and show up as a fantastical harlequin dancing into their midst.

When I come back, I can imbue the painting with so much vitality and strength, a kind of supercharged nutrition from the other side. Like a vitamin that gives me a superhuman boost on how to execute the painting. Shape shifting has its benefits!

What inspired your “sculptured paintings”, and what role do movement, color, and symbolism play in your work?

At 17-18 years old, I discovered Marcel Duchamp through the New York School of painters. They understood his use of the found object. It only gains its appeal when you remove it from its contextual setting. An absence of meaning is born. Objects started coming into my art forms with collage or 3D. In classical thought, creating with your hands is the superior way. I began embracing the human figure and making it with my hands in a new, hybrid fashion. Realistically, gesturally, and in a way that required escaping the flat 2D surface. I altered my process, stopping the vision stream, embracing a part of it, exploring it, exploding it, deconstructing and reconstructing it with my hands.

Movement is inherent in everything I do. To keep myself interested and as a way of capturing the audience. The subject is always doing something, even though the paint and foam pieces used to portray it are gorgeously static. Color is the bullet in my gun, I was born with. The only thing I didn’t need to learn. It has a subliminal power over the audience and creates reactions in them based on subconscious associations with colors and their complements. Symbolism is heavy. A symbol has a life of its own, detached from its intended meaning, which is familiar to someone who’s studied it. But as an abstracted thing, it can just be dripping with beauty. It retains tremendous visual potency even when removed from the narratives it’s couched within.

Art is the highest form of communication. A true artist is born that way, and the primary element is sensitivity. When you’re that sensitive, your instinct is to do everything to avoid pain and heartbreak.

Reality is strewn with bear traps that are going to wound you. Family, educators, peers, lovers… Maybe to transmute pain and make something beautiful from it is why there’s so much joy in my work. Joy that moves through me and back out in the gestural lines of the paintings.

Any curiosities and ruminations of the human mind are welcome. I’m not a guy who’s going to give you the petty. When people look at one of my pictures, no matter the subject matter, they’ll resonate with the beauty embedded in it.

What impact did the Neo Persona Gallery have on your practice, and what did it mean to engage with figures like Andy Warhol or Bob Dylan?

A big part of Neo Persona Gallery was that if no one was going to do it for me, I would do it for myself and my artist friends. In the 1980s, New York City's Soho galleries held the keys to the kingdom, and making it through their gates was nearly impossible. In Tribeca, tremendous talent was abundant around me that was floundering. Giving them - and myself - exhibitions meant attention, recognition, and money for everyone.

With a place to showcase my work, I was affected by coming into contact with so many people – artists and the public alike – and those biofeedback loops were fuel for my fire. But having the gallery was really a separate thing from my work.

It was during this period that my Jester avatar first appeared. The painting that introduced him, Amiss in the Abyss, was first exhibited at Neo Persona. It sprang from a life-altering experience I had in Venice, Italy, from which I’ve never fully returned to how I was before. I went from sipping a Campari and soda on a barstool near the open door of Cipriani’s Bar to being lost in time when a colorful jester in a black mask cavorted into view. I couldn’t look away or deny his allure and slipped from my stool to follow him into the night. Voyeurs, revelers, and other performers gathered and followed, too, as fanciful, playful, and utterly amiss, he cast a net of adoration, passion, and envy over me, disassembling my preoccupations as well as my ambitions for the evening.

There have been other moments in my life when time seemed to stop or cease to exist. This experience was so intense that the fabric of my reality seemed to disintegrate. I’d encountered an aspect of myself that seemed from the past and the future at once, born to be my guide. I had to bring this guy to life in my work. The encounter wasn’t located in reality, so I painted the abyss behind him and sketched him in… and realized he was me, flinging paint into the void.

Gazing into and sending messages into the abyss is what an iconic figure like Bob Dylan relates to in my work when he crossed my studio threshold. Though those hours and days were fascinating, especially since he was also a painter, they didn’t influence my work per se. The single biggest influence on my work has, and will always be, passion, which is only made possible by tremendous, visceral energy. A level of energy that makes you fearless to go backward to find, and forward to create with what you bring back. To make it take form in 3D space is asking yourself each time to do something you’ve never done before.

Desire has a mad, mindless aspect to it. It’s the most important ingredient in creativity and self- expression. It’s bigger than you, and it comes from before you. You can’t understand it. You just have to let it utilize you. And the forces that try to stop you far exceed the ones that encourage you. My greatest breakthroughs don’t occur when I’m standing in front of the canvas. What takes place in the mind is closer to its original essence than what I’m able to execute in the physical. What’s imperative is to find a way to capture the audience with each work. To employ the human mechanism of perception to climb inside their minds, to see from their point of view. Just for kicks.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Rob Mango: Instagram • Website

Amid the din and pace of Miami Art Week 2025, where every work competes for instant attention, Silke Bianca proposes the opposite: a space where time slows down, where visitors are invited to pause. The Zen Garden Cycle doesn’t show itself, but rather lets itself be observed. It’s an art that transforms the space into a small sanctuary of calm and reflection.

The monochrome surfaces, delicate reliefs, and subtle variations in light invite a slow and mindful experience. Here, the work demands to be experienced: visitors perceive light, texture, and depth with all their senses, entering into an intimate and personal dialogue with the space.

At the heart of this experience is Bianca’s vision: an art that coexists with everyday life, one that doesn’t simply decorate or furnish, but transforms the internal experience.

The balance between European tradition, Zen studies, and extended composition, in which works, furnishings, light, and proportions interact as a single organism, creates a harmonious environment, suspended between structure and openness, movement and stillness.

In this conversation, Silke Bianca reflects on the value of time in the encounter with the work, the boundary between art and design, and the practice of subtraction as a creative principle.

What emerges is a path that seeks not conclusions, but conditions: those of active calm, of a discreet and enduring presence, capable of accompanying the visitor even beyond the immediate experience.

Miami Art Week is one of the fastest-moving art contexts. Bringing the Zen Garden Cycle there felt almost meditative. What kind of experience did you want to create amid this constant flow of images and stimuli?

Rather than responding to the intensity of Miami Art Week with another strong visual statement, I was interested in introducing a different temporal experience. The Zen Garden Cycle is grounded in slowness, continuity, and repetition—qualities that resist the rapid turnover typical of fair environments.

The intention was not to withdraw from the surrounding energy, but to offer a moment within it where personal perception of the visitors could recalibrate. The works are not meant to arrest attention through immediacy; instead, they unfold gradually.

Light shifts across surfaces, textures reveal themselves over time, and the space begins to register physically rather than visually.

In a context saturated with images competing for instant recognition, the work proposes another mode of encounter, one based on duration, proximity, and quiet observation. It allows visitors to remain rather than move on, even if only briefly.

In your work, the artwork is never simply something to look at, but a space to inhabit. When did you realize that art could be a presence that affects daily life rather than just an exhibit?

This realization developed slowly and through experience rather than theory. As my work increasingly entered lived environments (homes, transitional spaces, places of passage), I became attentive to how people move around works, how long they remain, and how their behavior subtly shifts in response.

I noticed that the most lasting impact did not come from explanation or symbolism, but from the created atmosphere. When an artwork becomes part of the spatial fabric, it begins to influence mood, rhythm, and attention without asserting itself. That quiet influence interested me more than the idea of the artwork as a singular focal point.

From that moment on, I began to think of art less as an object to be contemplated and more as a presence that accompanies daily life, something that does not demand interpretation, but allows space for it.

You speak of harmony, inner home, and stillness while avoiding an explicitly political narrative. In an unstable time, is this a form of personal balance for you, or also a statement?

It begins as a personal orientation, but it inevitably extends beyond that. Stillness, for me, is not disengagement; it is a condition for clarity. In periods marked by instability and constant reaction, maintaining an inner sense of grounding becomes increasingly important to me.

By not embedding a direct political narrative, the work remains open to multiple readings and experiences. This openness allows viewers to approach the work from their own position, without being directed toward a specific conclusion. I see this as a form of respect toward the audience rather than neutrality.

In that sense, the work does make a statement, not through content, but through its insistence on another register of experience, one that values reflection, restraint, and attentiveness.

The dialogue between art and design is central to the Zen Garden Cycle. How do you define the boundary between a work that furnishes a space and one that transforms it internally?

For me, the distinction lies not in category, but in intention. Furnishing addresses use; transformation addresses perception. In the Zen Garden Cycle, art and design are conceived together rather than layered afterward. Carefully selected designer furniture complements the harmony of the works by extending their rhythm into the surrounding space.

I approach this process as a form of composition, which I refer to as art composing. Here, artworks, furniture, light, and spatial proportions are treated as interdependent elements rather than autonomous objects. None of them dominates; instead, they reinforce one another.

When this balance is achieved, the space begins to function as a coherent whole. It is no longer experienced as a room containing art, but as an environment shaped by a shared sensibility.

Your background spans European tradition and Buddhist Zen. How do these influences coexist in your work between structure and emptiness, control and letting go?

They coexist through a clear but quiet division of roles. European traditions inform the structural logic of the work; material choices, construction, and the decision to frame each piece in waxed iron.

These frames provide physical definition and stability, grounding the works within a precise material language.

Zen, on the other hand, informs reduction, restraint, and the treatment of surface and space. It shapes what is left open, unresolved, or intentionally quiet. Emptiness is not treated as absence, but as an active element that allows perception to unfold.

The work exists in the tension between these two positions. Structure holds space, but does not dominate it; openness remains present without becoming vague.

The monochrome surfaces and reliefs capture light and suggest quiet movement. How important is it for you that viewers slow down and take time with the work, especially in a fair context?

Time is fundamental to how my work operates. The surfaces are responsive rather than declarative. Light interacts with reliefs differently depending on movement, proximity, and duration, meaning the work cannot be fully grasped at a glance.

In fast-paced contexts, slowness becomes a choice rather than a given. The work does not ask viewers to slow down, but it offers conditions that make slowing down possible.

Those who remain longer are rewarded with subtle shifts and nuances that are otherwise easy to miss. This temporal aspect is essential to the integrity of the work and to the type of encounter I seek to create with my art.

If the Zen Garden Cycle represents a culmination in your career, what transformation have you undergone as an artist, and what emotional or mental space do you hope to leave with those who encounter these works?

The transformation has largely been one of reduction. Over time, I have learned to trust clarity and restraint, to remove elements rather than add them. This process has been less about refinement in a formal sense and more about allowing space for resonance.

What remains is not a conclusion, but a condition. I hope the work leaves viewers with a sense of quiet grounding, a feeling of being momentarily aligned, without explanation or narrative. Something subtle, but durable, that continues to resonate beyond the immediate encounter and finds its way back into everyday experience.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Silke Bianca: Instagram • Website

In Toby Mulligan’s painting, reality is never an immediate given, but something that must be constructed, verified, and almost tested before it can be narrated. His figures inhabit suspended spaces, sensual and exasperated, which seem to arise from a fragile balance between observation and imagination, between physical presence and restrained emotion. It’s not a matter of representing reality, but of traversing it to the point where form ceases to be descriptive and becomes experience.

A British artist, Mulligan works from miniatures and hand-built sets: small, concrete worlds, created specifically for true observation. A process reminiscent of the work of a sculptor, it allows him to understand the profound structure of figures before even painting them.

Ambidextrous painting thus becomes a tool for circumventing rational control, liberating a more direct, instinctive gesture, capable of combining precision and abandon.

Light, in his works, is never a secondary element: it is what brings things into existence, what creates rhythm, depth, and narration. Accentuated shadows, intense colours, and atmospheres charged with emotional tension transform each scene into a suspended fragment of life, where time seems to slow down and relationships, or their absence, become the true centre of the image.

Breaking between classical influences and contemporary sensibilities, between interior architecture and emotional landscapes, Toby Mulligan’s work explores the disorientation of human bonds and that subtle space where we feel together and, at the same time, irremediably alone.

In this conversation, the artist discusses his process, the role of exaggeration, light, and intuition, and how painting becomes a tool for understanding, rather than simplifying, who we are.

In your work, you start with miniatures and sets you build yourself. What does this process offer you that direct observation wouldn’t?

Well, I am painting from direct observation when I make these sets, and that’s exactly why I do them, because I need that concrete something to convince me, even though it’s a concrete reality that I have constructed.

You paint ambidextrously: how does this technique influence the spontaneity, control, and energy of your gesture?

This method is a deliberate way to bypass the constraining eye, the critical negative voice that always finds fault. Perhaps the effort of doing something that demands my full attention just to paint with both hands simultaneously frees up a creative flow. Like knocking out the guard at the entrance of the castle.

Your way of constructing subjects “like a sculptor” (bones, muscles, structure) seems to take you beyond representation. When do you understand that a figure has reached that point where “emotion surpasses reality”?

I do this so that I feel convinced (and I take a lot of convincing) that I really understand the form inside out. So one line can really speak for muscles, bones, weight, and feeling all at once without appearing heavy. And I think when I feel the line or colour is doing this, then the emotion is doing that work.

Light in your paintings is an almost narrative element: how do you choose the luminous atmosphere, and what role does it play in constructing the meaning of the scene?

Light is so fundamental that it is almost as though it brings things into existence. I can look at a landscape and take it or leave it, but when the sun comes out and creates shadows, I can’t contain myself. So I think that is its role for me. It creates meaning, a story that I have to tell.

Your paintings always convey a strong emotional energy, as if capturing a suspended moment. What kind of emotions or human states do you most seek to explore?

I think the feelings that I’m really drawn to expressing are those of connection (or the lack of it) in relationships. Being with or without and wondering why. What it is that’s changing. Of feeling alone with people, or very much with someone, though it may be a memory of them.

What is the relationship between observed reality and the constructed world? How much room do you leave for the unexpected or intuition compared to the initial plan?

I think so much of the constructed world is our observed reality that they’re in constant dialogue. We’re imagining and creating worlds to make it easier to imagine others and never truly inhabit the ones we’re actually living in. And I am very much flitting between the unexpected and the initial plan, as the initial plan is continually being affected by and adjusting to the evolving feelings and physical changes in the work as it’s progressing.

Your works combine classical influences and expressive immediacy. Which artistic references do you feel are still more vivid in your process today?

I’ve always been very drawn to architecture. Both contemporary and classical. And this certainly affects the sets that I make. Arches from Romanesque churches and strong Mediterranean colours, for example. Additionally, miniature, painted copies of paintings by Vermeer or Hopper are displayed on the walls.

Your figures seem to live in “sensual and exaggerated worlds”. What purpose does exaggeration serve in your work? What does it allow you to express that realism cannot?

I think exaggeration is vital. It’s what makes the work mine, and it really only works when I’m barely aware that I’m doing it. It feels so right and actually necessary to paint with that bright mauve or deepen that shadow so much that I have to do it.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Toby Mulligan: Instagram • Website

Looking at a Sharon Stone painting is like feeling the pulse of time: the colour vibrates, the gesture breathes, the form tells a story. For audiences who knew her as an absolute cinema icon – from the magnetic seduction of “Basic Instinct” to the dramatic depth of “Casino”, to the most intense and complex roles that defined her career – Stone today reveals another side of her creative power: that of a painter, author, activist, and cultural figure who traverses the arts with a presence capable of uniting instinct, memory, and vision.

Her history with painting, as she recounts in the interview, began as a child, alongside Vonne, her beloved aunt, a muralist, with whom she spent her days off from school.

That original connection with the pictorial gesture powerfully resurfaced during the pandemic, when Stone painted up to seventeen hours a day, transforming a period of global crisis into a return to the roots of her being.

International critics have recognized this evolution: Helen Stoilas and Whitney Mallet have praised her expressive power, while Jerry Saltz – a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the world’s most influential critics – dedicated an extensive essay to her work, even inviting her to his artist talks in Los Angeles and New York. Her exhibitions have been enthusiastically received by collectors, curators, and leading figures in the art scene.

Her creative journey, however, extends beyond painting and film. Sharon Stone is also an established author, with the New York Times bestseller, “The Beauty of Living Twice”, and is recognized as a cultural and humanitarian leader: her numerous awards include a Golden Globe, an Emmy, an Oscar nomination, a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, the Nobel Peace Summit Award, the Women Making History Award, and the United Nations Global Citizen of the Year.

Works like “River,” dedicated to her late nephew, transform grief into acceptance; the new portraits, born from a spiritual dialogue that the artist defines as a form of “creative channelling”, give voice to presences, memories, and intuitions that demand representation.

The new series of portraits, The Rogues Gallery Collection, conceived as an immersive, phone-free experience, invites the public to a direct encounter with art and with themselves, in a time suspended from the noise of the world.

In her current artistic phase, Stone maintains a unique balance between abstraction and figuration. Some of her figurative works originate from referential sketches by Gabriel Aubry, which become the starting point for a painting in which the visible and the intuitive intertwine.

At this moment in her life, Sharon Stone unites film, painting, and spirituality in a single creative thread, allowing each work to become a gesture of freedom, consciousness, and transformation.

And now, let’s let Sharon Stone speak: through her words, we enter her inner world, the heart of her art, and the profound vision that guides her new creative season.

How did your painting journey begin? Was it a sudden urge or a natural evolution of your expressiveness after the film?

When I was a kid, I spent all of my time off from school with my aunt and my grandmother, who lived next door to one another. My Aunt had a master’s degree in painting, and she painted murals on the walls of the houses. I learned to paint by being with her and ultimately painting with her when I was very small.

Your works blend abstraction and figuration: how does this “borderline” between the recognizable and the undefined arise, and what do you seek in the pictorial gesture?

Oh… come on; how like life this is. When does a thing become real? When does the real thing suddenly become abstract? I joked in school that the first impressionist was just a guy with bad eyesight.

In “River”, dedicated to your deceased nephew, the river almost resembles a human figure with open arms; how much did this painting help you process your grief and transform it into art?

Transformation is a process; this painting was the prettier part. That is the beautiful thing about painting for me: I can take those difficult feelings and push them through to a more enlightened, less dense place in myself and hopefully into the piece. River is a meaningful piece in my private collection, because it does afford the understanding of acceptance.

In your new portraits, you tell stories of souls who asked to be painted: how does this dialogue with the spiritual world arise, and how does it translate into your painting?

Since this happened for me with these paintings, I have had dialogue with other artists who have had similar experiences: talking to their sculpturers, drawing, artwork of all types. It seems to be less uncommon than I thought.

Yes, my paintings ‘talked’ to me, and I wouldn’t have believed it either, but they told me things I had to look up online to read about and understand. Things from other times and other places of which I had no knowledge.

Of course, when I played Ginger in Casino, there was no doubt for me that I could hear the woman whom this character was based on speaking to me in my mind and in my heart. I do believe that there is a type of artistic channeling that sometimes, when I get very lucky happens for me.

The “Rogues Gallery” exhibition offers an immersive and “unplugged” experience, free of phones. What do you hope the public will discover in this direct encounter with art and with themselves?

I envision my new portrait series, titled The Rogues Gallery, being experienced as an unplugged, phone-free art happening, complete with personally hosted performative experiences that will take immersion to a whole new level.

The transition from abstract to figurative (in your new portrait series) marks a new phase in your pictorial language. What inner need led you to portraiture and the memory of faces?

There have been many discussions about The Muse; in fact, I have played such a character for director/writer Albert Brooks.

In ancient times, when an artist or performer was in their excellence, the audience would clap and shout ALLAH ALLAH as they believed this would call for God to continue blessing them with this energy of brilliance. Eventually, through ego and finance, people began to believe that they were the energy all by themselves, and when that didn’t always work, they called upon their Muse to come, to assist.

But who is the Muse if not the God energy flowing freely through ourselves? Is it not allowing oneself to live in god consciousness?

I paint what I feel to paint, I listen, and I do.

How has your film experience – from the success of “Basic Instinct” to more dramatic roles like “Casino” – influenced the way you construct a canvas or tell a visual story?

The very fact that I am clear that it IS a story, I’m sure, is from my love of literature and film.

Though my love of art has only grown with my ability to travel around the world and see art from every century and every culture, to be a student of art is to me, to have experienced not only the art but also from whence it came.

I went to Belgium and went to the house of Magritte, and to see all of the objects and life that lives in those astounding paintings just there, in the living room, his wife’s gorgeous rugs on the walls; well… life is the influence of the artist, the canvas varies.

What have you learned about yourself through painting that you hadn’t yet discovered as an actress?

I am equally inspired alone in an empty studio, with tubes of paint, brushes, and canvases, as I am on a movie set with all of my talented, interesting colleagues.

You’ve often spoken about your spiritual journey and Buddhism: how has this philosophy transformed your way of experiencing, creating, and interpreting reality?

Yes. This is a very centring way of life for me, in what has become a rather theatrical reality.

Looking to the future, are you already envisioning a new direction for your art or a possible dialogue between film, painting, and spirituality in your next creative chapter?

Yes, I am finding that these worlds are already gently combining. As I feel more comfortable with myself as a more realized person, I am finding that all of the facets of my world are getting comfortable with the idea of me being more.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Sharon Stone: Instagram • Website

Ludovico Tersigni returns to the public in a renewed, almost transfigured form. For many, he’s still the magnetic face of Skam Italia, the fragile and radiant protagonist of Summertime, or the actor who made his mark in Slam – Tutto per una ragazza and Arance e Martello. Others remember his spontaneity as a host on the Italian stage of X Factor. But behind the lights of the sets, in recent years, another life has taken hold: quieter, slower, more essential.

The transformation wasn’t just artistic, but profoundly internal. Born in Nettuno, near Rome, Tersigni embarked on a spiritual journey of listening, meditation, and discipline. Yoga became a daily destination, a return to body and breath. It’s from there – from that suspended time that flows between an asana and a fading thought – that his new creative identity seems to have emerged. A quest that has nothing to do with image, but with essence.

Perhaps this is why, speaking with him, ideas resonate with those who are walking a path of awareness. Like the reflection in the Fight Club movie: “The things you own, ultimately own you”. A warning that seems to echo in his sculptures, in his drawings, in the need to free oneself from what is unnecessary to return to the original matter of things.

Or like the words of the Italian journalist and writer Tiziano Terzani, who reminded us that: “Deep in everyone’s heart, what is right and what is wrong is already written, not by imposition, but by intuition”. A phrase that seems to describe the way Tersigni, also an author of books, approaches art: not to follow a rule, but to pursue his own, internal, almost ancestral truth.

This new phase of his life takes shape in two exhibition projects: Luz – Viaggio Verso la Redenzione, a solo exhibition at the Miart Gallery in Milan, and a selection of works presented in Rome in the group exhibition L’Arte dell’Avvento, at the Emmeotto Arte Gallery.

Luz is the pulsating center of this journey. Luz is not just a title, but a symbol of something more; its history is rooted in the most ancient spiritual traditions – from Jewish to Muslim, to the practice of yoga and the awakening of the Kundalini. It is a recurring form, an archetype. It is a seed, a nucleus, a vital organ.

Sometimes it is a compact mass, other times a fragment that seems on the verge of opening. Luz recounts an inner journey made of falls, restarts, and fractures that become glimpses. It is the vivid image of rebirth, the material that contains the possibility of clarity.

And the works – sculptures, textured canvases, impulsive and thoughtful drawings – all seem to arise from the same profound point: a place where spirituality, memory, the body, and discipline intertwine.

It is in this suspended space between public past and intimate present that the following conversation takes place. A sincere, vulnerable dialogue, in which Ludovico Tersigni recounts not only his artistic journey, but above all his human transformation: the need to listen to himself, the need for subtraction, his relationship with his family, the search for Light, his Luz.

How did you approach art, and sculpture in particular?

I was fortunate to have an eclectic and self-taught father. He was a doctor, but also a musician, guitarist, and singer; at the end of his life, he began playing the piano. He was curious and deeply artistic. My uncle was also a great artist, painting in oils, as was my father, who, over time, increasingly developed his own style.

I grew up surrounded by colors, brushes, and the smell of turpentine: for a child, it was a world of magical toys. All of this entered into me. When my father passed away, I believe a search began: a way to rediscover that complicity and that kind of perspective we shared.

I think the artistic process is linked to the search for a Daimon, a sort of invisible companion, like a thought that continues even when we are still.

Is creativity a family legacy?

Yes. My grandfather was an antique restorer and cabinetmaker, and so was his father. In our family, we’ve always worked with our hands. You can start painting even at 50, sure, but if you see it as a child, it’s different. It’s like saying: I’m using what you taught me, but to tell my own things.

My father introduced me to drawing and the technique of chiaroscuro. Then a friend of mine asked me to accompany him to a sculpture class. I remembered that my father’s last work had been a little horse, and so I thought I’d use that “seed” he’d left me.

My second work was, in fact, a horse’s head, which my teacher, Alberto Emiliano Durante, then advised me to cast in bronze. Bronze changed my perspective on many things.

And it was precisely during a phase of personal research that you came to sculpture. How did this transition occur?

Mysteriously and naturally at the same time. At a certain point, I felt the need for a language that was more physical, more concrete, something I could literally touch with my hands. Clay, plaster, iron... it’s as if they called to me. I began as a self-taught artist, observing, making mistakes, and getting dirty.

And I realized that, here too, the body is the protagonist. In acting, you seek emotions; in sculpture, you seek forms. But in both cases, you seek yourself.

How does one of your works originate? An idea, an urgent need, a mistake?

Not from error, at least not yet. It stems from a profound urgency. A counterintuitive choice in my life was turning down the second season of X Factor to follow my desire for travel and freedom. I’ve been to Argentina, Costa Rica, the United States, Morocco, the Canary Islands, and India. To India, I brought fundamental texts with me: the Bhagavadgītā, Mircea Eliade’s yoga.

There, I encountered the concept of Luz, my main research. It’s an ancient, almost forgotten idea, linked to mystical flight: rising above matter through imagination and art.

What does this “mystical leap” linked to Luz mean to you?

It’s like reaching a threshold: a critical mass of information and emotions that, at a certain point, overflows. It can’t be explained in words alone, and the sculpture becomes a synthesis of all this.

Do you remember your first work related to Luz?

Yes, the Luz of Babylon. I realized it at night. But the whole journey began mainly during my time in India and the spiritual readings of that trip.

What is your liberating gesture when you work?

It’s a generative force that electrifies you. Entering a flow where what needs to happen happens. It doesn’t always happen: often it just takes concentration, proportion, and technique. But when that thing comes along, you drop everything.

It’s like a writer struck by an idea: if he doesn’t have pen and paper, he repeats it a thousand times until he learns it. Then you reach exhaustion, contemplate the work, and feel it’s finished.

Are yoga and Buddhism part of your path?

Yes, I approached it because I felt a calling. I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, but certain rituals and practices have opened up a whole new world. Training the body to train the spirit, creating a connection. It’s a journey.

How does your communication between television audiences and art audiences change?

At X Factor, communication is almost a service: helping the kids get on stage, setting the pace for the show, following a set list. In art, it’s different: there, you try to communicate an inner world, a vision.

What does sculpture give you that no other art form gives you?

It gives me a sense of absolute presence. When I sculpt, I can’t hide: either I’m there, or I’m not. There are no tricks, no “good light,” no editing that saves a scene. There’s only the material and the way you choose to approach it. And then it gives me a very strong grounding.

Clay resists you, forces you to confront what’s inside you. It’s a gentle struggle, a continuous negotiation. And in that resistance, I find a truth that is more difficult to reach in other languages.

What is your relationship with acting today?

Acting is my original home. It’s the language that allowed me to discover parts of myself I didn’t know existed. But it’s also a job that requires patience: you have to wait for the right projects, you can’t decide everything, and you depend on so many variables.

Today, I approach it with more maturity. I no longer have the anxiety of “always being there.” I want to be there when it’s needed, when a role truly calls to me. I prefer one film that changes me to ten experiences that leave me indifferent.

And this personal maturity led you, as you said, to learn to say “no”. Was it difficult?

Yes, because we grew up with the idea that saying “no” means losing something. In reality, it means saving yourself. When I realized I was piling on too many commitments just out of fear of giving up, I stopped. I started asking myself: “Does this project nourish me? Does it make me grow? Does it respect me as an artist and as a human being?” and so I made more conscious choices.

I’m not interested in being in a thousand places; I’m interested in being in the right place. And this is the greatest freedom I’ve discovered.

Which series of works are you most proud of?

I’m proud of Luz’s series. It’s the one that resonates with me the most and was born from a profound spiritual and personal synthesis. The feedback I received, as in Rome, at Palazzo Ripetta, helped me understand the direction I was taking.

Is there a historical, mythological, or cultural reference that you feel close to?

Yes, classical mythology, Indian tradition, the dimension of symbolic flight, such as Icarus or Ishvara in yoga. My work has a classical foundation because I come from that background, but Luz is already an attempt to bring it into the contemporary.

What do you see in your artistic future? Will you continue with Luz?

I don’t know what stage of the journey I’m at. As with pranayama, if you don’t exhale completely, you can’t truly inhale. But I know that Luz will return to my life. For now, I’m living this phase to the fullest: with affection, without premature nostalgia.

In the future, I may develop new series and cycles, depending on what life and spirituality bring me... and I’d also love to exhibit in Japan.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Ludovico Tersigni: Instagram • Instagram 2

Born in Rome, Massimo Nunzi is one of the most important figures on the contemporary Italian jazz scene. A musician, composer, and arranger, he works at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone in the capital, where he leads musical projects and teaches young talents.

His artistic journey has led him to collaborate with major names in the music industry, create innovative works in Italy and abroad, and train generations of passionate and skilled musicians. As he himself states: “Jazz is not just a musical style, it’s a way of breathing, of communicating, of living”.

In recent years, Nunzi has led highly significant projects, such as the Jazz Campus Orchestra in Castelporziano, which was recently awarded by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella. At the same time, he continues to develop original works and to share his unique approach to music with young people, emphasizing improvisation, collaboration, and mutual respect.

In this interview, Nunzi retraces his beginnings, his encounters with great masters, his relationships with students and parents, and his vision of jazz in the Italian music scene.

When did you start playing and what was your musical education like?

I started relatively late: I bought a piano at 23. Not for lack of resources, but because my family wasn’t used to cultivating an instrument at home. When you enter the conservatory, you immediately notice that many kids already have years of practice and instruments at their disposal.

The trumpet, then, was considered an orchestral instrument, and they rarely gave you space unless you were an extraordinary talent. So I had to make do on my own, carving out my own path with what I had available: a bit of jazz, a bit of rock, fragments of literature from the likes of Calvino or Flaiano... combining these elements to create a musical language all my own.

How important were teachers in your growth?

Fundamental. Like anyone, I had teachers who either opened your mind or closed it. I was fortunate to meet extraordinary people: Pietro Garinei and Italo Gomez, for example, recognized me immediately.

Garinei entrusted me with seven dates at the Sistina Theatre without even seeing me play in person. Gomez sensed that my work was innovative and creative and allowed me to create original works. Those encounters change your life, give you confidence, and open doors you’d never find on your own.

How do you relate to your students today?

I believe deeply in empathy and respect. It’s not just about technique, but about making the kids feel that I believe in them. If someone doesn’t do their homework, I don’t punish them: I tell them, “Don’t worry, you’ll study next time”.

They feel at ease with me because I take them into wonderful settings: they play together, have fun, and learn the joy of music. They enjoy feeling part of a team: everyone contributes, everyone applauds, and there’s no competition. This spirit of collaboration is very important for their musical and personal growth.

And what role do parents play?

Parents are crucial. I see families who sacrifice everything for their children, and this love is immediately apparent. In my case, my mother, even though she didn’t fully understand what I was doing, had faith in me and allowed me to develop my talent.

I believe that’s where much of my self-esteem comes from. In general, a young musician’s journey is always easier if someone believes in them: without this support, without extraordinary willpower, it becomes almost impossible to continue.

What’s the state of jazz in Italy today?

Unfortunately, jazz isn’t the center of attention in Italy: audiences seem drawn to other genres. However, I believe in the new generations I’m training: they’re not snobbish, they share with joy, and learn improvisation.

Today, jazz is no longer just a musical style, but a concept, a way of breathing and communicating. Jazz is now everywhere, in all genres, thanks to crossover. That’s why I have great faith in young people, who will be able to continue this tradition of creativity and openness.

Which projects have had the greatest impact on you?

There are several. With Garinei at the Sistina Theatre in Rome and with Italo Gomez in Como, I had experiences that allowed me to explore new languages. In Paris, I created some of the most important works of my life: “Sentimental Funerali” about the Holocaust, “Calvinology” dedicated to Italo Calvino, and “The Jungle Book”.

Each project was a creative risk, a way to explore uncharted territory. Some works may only be understood later, but the important thing is to always follow your own artistic vision.

Can you tell us about some important collaborations?

Yes, I’ve collaborated with Radio France, Art Farmer, Tony Scott, Adriano Mazzoletti, and many others who believed in me. Without them, many works would never have been created. Friends like Paolo Giaccio have also contributed to important projects. There have been many people who have taken risks with me, allowing me to turn my ideas into reality.

Casa Moderna - By Massimo Nunzi - Jazz Sextet

How do you teach respect and discipline through music?

I teach life through music. Respect for my classmates, for the sound engineers, for the entire environment: I explain that the sound engineers get up three hours early to prepare us and that we must be kind and respectful. This isn’t just a technical discipline, but an education for life. Music becomes a means to teach values ​​that last forever.

What does creativity and innovation mean to you?

It means exploring uncharted territory and building something original with what you have available. Like a musical Robinson Crusoe: shells, reels, and pieces of wood become elements to build a world of their own.

I’ve taken fragments of culture and music and transformed them into an original language. This is sometimes difficult to understand, especially in Italy, but I’ve never sought recognition: people have come who have seen the value of my work.

What message would you like to convey to students and audiences?

Nothing can stop you if you believe in yourself. Music is joy, collaboration, and freedom. Improvisation isn’t just a technique, but a way of life. Having people who believe in you is essential, but passion, perseverance, and respect are what really make the difference.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Massimo Nunzi: Instagram • SoundCloud • Website

“My relationship with the mirror began long before I ever used it as a surface to paint on. I’ve always been drawn to the way a mirror holds both presence and absence, how it captures a moment but never keeps it”.

With these words, artist Samara Couri reveals the origins of a language that, in recent years, has led her to expand her research beyond the image, towards the realm of ritual and relationship. Her projects dedicated to the Akua (the Hawaiian deities who embody the forces and rhythms of nature), collaborations with kumu and cultural practitioners, and support for local communities such as Ka Lāhui Hawai‘i, mark an artistic journey that intertwines spirituality, ecology, and memory.

In her mirror paintings, the reflection becomes a living organism, a shared breath between viewer, light, and landscape, where the work is always in motion and experience becomes revelation.

Following her words, one senses the presence of a thin thread that unites what appears and what escapes, a silent dialogue between light, matter, and spirit. From this suspended space, where each image breathes with the world around it, the ensuing conversation takes shape: a journey through identity, nature, and profound listening.

Your art is imbued with introspection and a strong sense of empathy. Do you believe that the mirror, in your visual language, is also a way to explore awareness and the connection between humans and nature?

Yes, absolutely. The mirror naturally creates a dialogue between the viewer and the world around them, and that dialogue is at the heart of what I’m trying to explore.

Because the mirror includes everything reflected in it—the sky, plants, people, shifting light—it becomes a space where human and natural presence coexist. I’m interested in how we see ourselves within the environment, not separate from it.

Painting on mirrors allows me to gesture toward that interconnectedness. The viewer becomes aware not only of themselves but of the larger rhythms they’re part of. That awareness is a form of empathy, recognising that our inner landscape is inseparable from the outer one.

Your biography reveals a journey through multiple cultures. How has this geographical shift influenced your artistic and spiritual vision?

Living between cultures has shaped me in ways I’m still discovering. Growing up in London exposed me to a wide spectrum of art, ideas, and communities, but moving to Hawai‘i shifted my sense of place entirely.

Hawai‘i is a place where the land has a voice, where the environment, the stories, and the ancestral lineages are alive in everyday life. Being welcomed into that space has deepened my understanding of what it means to belong, to listen, and to create with intention.

Spiritually, it grounded me. Artistically, it pushed me to work with materials and methods that reflect impermanence, reflection, and relationship. The mirror, in many ways, became a response to living in a place where nature and the sacred are inseparable.

In the project “Akua – Hawaiian Deities”, you explore Hawaiian mythology and spirituality. How did you come into contact with this world, and what inspired you to transform it into art?

My entry point into this world has always been through relationships with people who generously share their knowledge, their stories, and their cultural context with me.

Working closely with kumu (teachers) and cultural practitioners helped me understand that the Akua are not distant mythological figures; they are embodiments of natural forces, cycles, and relationships.

What inspired me to transform this into art was the profound beauty of seeing the sacred expressed through nature itself and all the elements that the Akua represent, such as the rain, ocean, and forest.

The mirror allowed me to honour that idea of reflection. The Akua are present in the environment, and the environment is reflected in the work. It felt like the right language to use.

You collaborate with Kumu A‘ia‘i Bello and support groups like “Ka Lāhui Hawai‘i”, committed to promoting indigenous practices and voices. How important is it for you that art also be a bridge of respect and cultural authenticity?

It’s essential. Working within Indigenous contexts requires deep respect, humility, and accountability. I see my role not as someone who is interpreting a culture, but as someone creating in relationship with people who carry that knowledge.

Collaborations with Kumu A‘ia‘i Bello and supporting groups like Ka Lāhui Hawai‘i have shaped the way I work. They ensure that my process honours lineage, accuracy, and community.

For me, art should never extract; it should contribute. If my work can serve as a bridge—encouraging understanding, amplifying Indigenous voices, or inviting people to engage with Hawai‘i beyond the surface—then I feel I’m doing something meaningful.

In your project descriptions, you refer to the “Akua” as “reflections of nature and its rhythms”. Is there a deity, or a natural principle, that you feel particularly close to your artistic sensibility?

All of the Akua and natural principles are equally important, and they rely on each other, just as humans rely on these elements for life. For example, I feel especially connected to the rhythms of water: its movement, adaptability, and ability to hold memory. In Hawaiian tradition, water is deeply tied to life, genealogy, and spiritual cleansing.

That sense of continuity and flow mirrors my own relationship with the mirror surface. Water, like the mirror, reflects but also transforms. It reveals what’s beneath, but never in the same way twice. I am drawn to the movement between clarity and distortion, stillness and change.

Painting on mirrors presents unique technical and conceptual challenges. How do you navigate this balance between material, light, and reflected image?

Mirrors demand constant negotiation. Light behaves differently hour by hour, and colours shift depending on what the mirror is reflecting. Instead of fighting that instability, I embrace it.

Technically, I work in layers, allowing the mirror to remain exposed in certain areas so the reflection becomes part of the composition. Conceptually, I let the materials lead. I’m not trying to fix an image in time; I’m creating a framework that interacts with whatever (or whoever) completes it in the moment.

That tension between control and surrender is what I love about working with mirrors.

Looking back on your career, is there a moment or work that you feel represents a threshold, a transformation in your artistic practice?

One turning point was when I realised that the work didn’t need to be self-contained—that the environment and the viewer could be active participants. The first time I exhibited a mirror piece outdoors and watched the landscape shift inside it, something clicked.

It changed the way I understood authorship, presence, and composition. From that point on, my practice became less about creating a fixed image and more about opening a space for reflection in every sense of the word.

Working in a natural context like Hawaii also requires a profound attention to the environment. Do you think art can contribute to a new form of spiritual and cultural ecology?

Yes, I do. Art can invite people to pay attention—truly pay attention—to the places they inhabit. In Hawai‘i, where land and culture are deeply interwoven, that attention becomes a form of stewardship.

If art can reconnect people to the rhythms of nature, to ancestral knowledge, or to the sacredness of place, then it participates in a cultural ecology rooted in respect. I see my work as a small part of that conversation, a way to remind viewers that they are not separate from the land, but in continuous relationship with it.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Samara Couri: Instagram • Website

Tell us what you do and your beginnings.

I am a visual artist working across various media, particularly relief and installation. My earlier works were based on formative and historical images from Zionist culture, approached with a mix of irony and innocence toward the collective culture I come from.

This was expressed through the choice of industrial, synthetic, and artificial materials to represent these images. My later works build on the earlier ones, both as raw material and as content.

I became interested in treating the works as an organic body that changes over time while seemingly remaining the same. This is one of the reasons I chose to work with materials that transform with time and respond to chemical reactions, such as coffee and different types of metal fibers.

What does your work aim to say?

Above all, my interest lies in creating a physical experience to communicate with the viewer. A good example of what I mean can be found in Caravaggio’s painting The Incredulity of Saint Thomas.

In the painting, Thomas reaches out his finger to touch Christ’s wound after the resurrection. He does not rely solely on what he sees; he must also verify it through touch.

The physical experience I am after lies in the tension between sight and touch, in the need to confirm vision through physical contact. In English, the verb “to touch” is also used metaphorically, as in “to be touched emotionally”.

In my work, I try to translate this metaphorical meaning into a concrete expression of the temptation to touch – almost a reconstruction of that primal moment of doubt between sight and touch.

Where do you find inspiration for your art?

For me, curiosity and attentiveness to my surroundings come before inspiration, because they make me more active in finding interest. A sentence I once heard from a professor during my studies still accompanies me today:

“Work with materials you don’t like. When you work with materials you dislike, you’re not afraid to play with them or destroy them”.

In that sense, I am drawn to material expressions of neglect – mold, rust, corrosion. The banal and the mundane are often the situations and materials where I find inspiration.

Could you give us some insight into your creative process?

My process combines playful trial and error with a strict inner logic of working with materials. These rules provide the structure that allows me to discover new expressive possibilities with the materials I use.

Sometimes a new process begins unexpectedly. I look for a solution to a very concrete problem. The solution I find does not necessarily resolve the problem, but it opens up a new horizon for the material I am working with – for example, steel wool.

By horizon, I might mean a different state of matter or a new surface quality that emerges.

What are your future projects?

I am at the beginning of a new project involving a wall relief and a sculptural installation. These works are based on iconic images from Zionist culture, undergoing material transformation and shifts of scale influenced by the exhibition space in which they will be shown.

At this stage, I am experimenting with different ways to realize the work. Since part of the project involves casting, I am currently exploring possibilities for creating the models that I will later digitize. It is also possible that these experiments will lead me to a very different process than the one I originally planned.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Gal Weinstein: Website

Tell us what you do and your beginnings.

I manipulate oil paint on linen canvas. I am trying to create illusions with pigments to be perceived as human skin, nature, atmosphere, and objects.

In the beginning, there were endless hours in the museums around the world, studying and analyzing in detail the old masters. I was fascinated and still I am with the techniques and the skill level of them. I was observing every layer of paint from the masterpieces till the guard of the museum will let me know that they are closing.

What does your work aim to say?

Most of my work has a social and/or moral meaning. A meaning that concerns me and my experiences. My own reality. I work oddly. First is the composition that pleases me aesthetically, and during the process, the subject matter takes shape. I don’t aim to say anything in particular.

It is a satisfaction of my need to create and to communicate throw my introvert personality. I let the subconscious take over with an allegory or an abstraction. A rendered narration or even a single brushstroke can describe the state of mind of the painter.

Where do you find inspiration for your art?

Mythology, literature, philosophy, nature, a visit to a museum, to an archaeological site, and so on. Inspiration appears to me when I am not intentionally searching for it. It can be from an artwork, from a story that I read to a leaf from a tree.

I have always been interested in mythological stories that have an ageless message to say.

Could you give us some insight into your creative process?

I am constantly scrutinizing the techniques of the old masters, especially those of the Baroque era. Therefore, my process starts with the traditional methods of oil painting. Then I like to explore the freedom and the possibilities that painting is giving us.

The effortless abstract shapes of paint can be the most effective way to make something alive and real. In my work, I care a lot about making the most from my tools. I like to push oil paint to the limits and see what happens. I used to do it since I got my first time brush in my hand.

After many years of practicing and gaining more experience, I can guess the results of my process. This doesn’t happen always, though; sometimes the results will surprise me, and sometimes I will overdo it and start all over. I never let a painting leave my studio if it doesn’t look complete in my eyes. Complete for me is not to the finest detail, but to the way the paint describes something. It can be a single brushstroke but still be enough.

What are your future projects?

Paint and paint. It is a lifestyle for me. I am getting ready now for my solo exhibition in October at the Stand in Line Gallery in Nicosia, Cyprus

The subject of my new exhibition is the island of Circe. Not Circe herself, but what the island that she lives, represents. I take an alternative point of view of the myth and focus on a moral message.

I see Circe’s transformation of men to animals as a circular journey, a rebirth of our society and ourselves.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Konstantinos Kyrtis: Instagram

Tell us what you do and your beginnings.

My name is Dejana Nežić, also known as Girl with Wings. I was born without arms, but I’ve always felt that my wings are invisible — expressed through creativity, sport, and art. I paint exclusively with my feet, using acrylic on canvas.

My artistic journey began when I was very young, as drawing became my natural way of expressing emotions and seeing beauty in the world. I became the youngest member of VDMFK (The Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists) at only nine years old, and I still proudly paint for this international organization today.

Over the years, I’ve grown into a professional artist, a World and European Champion in para-taekwondo, and in 2023, I also became a mother — an experience that added a whole new depth to my creativity.

My paintings have become increasingly sought-after in recent years, so I now mostly paint on commission. Both collectors and I love the pop-art style that I’ve embraced over the past few years; it allows me to combine color, energy, and emotion in a very personal way.

What does your work aim to say?

Through my art, I want to show that limits exist only in the mind. Each painting tells a story of freedom, courage, and individuality. My goal is to encourage people to look beyond physical boundaries and see strength in difference. The colorful, pop-art style of my works reflects joy, energy, and the vibrant rhythm of life.

Inspiration and motivation for others are also a big part of what we do — that’s why my husband and I are so active on social media. We want to show that people with disabilities can fight for and achieve a beautiful, fulfilled, and high-quality life.

Where do you find inspiration for your art?

I find inspiration in my personal experiences, travels, nature, and emotions. Every place I visit — from the beaches of the Maldives to the skyline of Dubai — brings a new perspective that I translate onto canvas. Animals, cities, and symbolic wings often appear in my works, representing movement, harmony, and hope.

Many people also reach out asking me to paint their pets, which often gives me wonderful new ideas for my next pieces.

Could you give us some insight into your creative process?

I paint directly with my feet. The process begins when I decide what I want to paint; sometimes I sketch with a pencil in my notebook, sometimes I draw it on my iPad, and sometimes I go straight to the canvas.

Once the idea feels right, I start painting freely and intuitively. I always play music while painting — it helps me get into a good mood and fully immerse myself in the creative flow.

What are your future projects?

I have just returned from AccessAbilities Expo 2025 in Dubai, where I painted live in front of a large international audience — an unforgettable experience. Since we’ve been traveling for almost two months, I plan to spend the next month or two at home to rest and create new works.

In December, I will have exhibitions in Ljubljana and Zagreb, and in January 2025, I’ll be exhibiting in Brussels, Belgium.

Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website

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Dejana Nežić: Website • Instagram • Instagram2 • YouTube • TikTok

From long-forgotten floppy disks to portraits celebrating icons of pop culture and history, Taylor Smith's art stems from a desire to transform obsolescence into contemporary language. Raised in an environment steeped in Pop Art—her mother witnessed Andy Warhol's first exhibition in Los Angeles—Smith developed a sensibility that intertwines personal memory, social criticism, and a fascination with cultural myths.

After studying in Germany, where she even contributed to Keith Haring's mural on the Berlin Wall, her research focused on fragile materials laden with invisible histories: Polaroids, 8mm film, and, above all, floppy disks. Media originally designed to contain now-unreadable data become, in her hands, surfaces of painting, capable of evoking nostalgia, questioning the relationship between technology and consumption, and giving new life to what seemed destined to disappear.

Between homage and criticism, Smith's practice addresses the major issues of our time: from environmental sustainability to the cult of icons, to the urgency of climate change, as in her works made with melted snow, a poetic and political testimony to the fragility of mountain landscapes.

For her exhibition at Pando Fine Art in Park City, the artist presents new works that expand her visual vocabulary with playful and personal subjects, maintaining the tension between memory and transformation.

You were exposed to art from a young age, including through your mother's connection to Andy Warhol's first exhibition. How did that early exposure to Pop Art influence your artistic journey?

From a very young age, Pop Art was not just something I read about in books; it was something that was part of my family’s lived experience. My mother, who was also an artist, was present at Andy Warhol’s very first exhibition in Los Angeles, and that connection gave me an early understanding of art as something bold, provocative, and accessible, rather than confined to an academic pedestal. Warhol’s ability to transform everyday objects and cultural icons into art had a profound effect on me.

We were also a family, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who had striking contemporary art on our walls while the homes of my childhood friends were filled with what I considered safe, traditional works from another era. Our family lived in and with the art and architecture of that moment, immersed in the energy of its artistic movement. That environment taught me that art was not something distant or decorative, but alive, radical, and deeply interwoven with everyday life.

As I grew into my own practice, that influence resurfaced in unexpected ways. In my Luxurious Disaster paintings, for example, I’m very aware of the Pop tradition of elevating consumer imagery and questioning the promises of the “American Dream”.

Similarly, in my floppy disk works, I’m drawing on that same Pop instinct to take an overlooked or obsolete object and give it new cultural resonance. What Warhol and the Pop artists demonstrated was that the things of daily life—whether a soup can, a movie star, or, in my case, a forgotten piece of technology—could hold immense meaning and reflect the spirit of a generation.

That early exposure planted the seed for my fascination with memory, nostalgia, and cultural mythology. It taught me that art could both mirror and critique its time, and that remains central to my work today.

You studied in Germany and even contributed to the base of Keith Haring's mural on the Berlin Wall; how has that experience impacted your art today?

Studying art in Germany was a transformative period that grounded my practice in experimentation and critical engagement with history. At the Academy of Fine Arts (AdBK), I was influenced by post-war contemporary German artists, whose use of layering, fractured imagery, and memory continues to resonate in my own work.

Contributing to the base layer of Keith Haring’s mural on the Berlin Wall was equally formative. The Wall was not only a political barrier but also a canvas charged with urgency, and Haring’s project showed me how art could communicate across divides and stand as a witness to history.

Those experiences still echo through my practice today. In my floppy disk paintings, the disks themselves act as fragments of history—discarded technologies carrying invisible memories—much like the Wall’s surface carried layers of marks and stories. And in my Luxurious Disaster series, the layering and collision of imagery reflect what I absorbed in Germany: that art is never just surface, but a dialogue with memory, resilience, and cultural myth.

Your work transforms floppy disks—an obsolete and non-recyclable medium—into vibrant portraits. What first inspired you to experiment with this unusual medium?

I have always been drawn to obsolete and vintage media—Polaroid film, 35mm photography, and even 8mm home movies—because they carry with them a sense of fragility, nostalgia, and memory. Years ago, I stumbled upon a box of my own floppy disks from the 1980s and 1990s, and it immediately struck me how these once-essential objects had become both useless and irreplaceable. They were no longer technically functional, but they still carried weight as artifacts of a specific cultural and personal moment.

Rather than allow them to end up in a landfill, I felt compelled to repurpose them, to give them a second life as the very surface for my paintings. In transforming something non-recyclable and forgotten into art, I found a way to honor both my passion for recycling and my fascination with memory. The disks became more than just materials—they became collaborators across time, carrying invisible histories while opening up new possibilities for contemporary portraiture.

Floppy disks once stored personal data, now illegible. Do you consider your art a form of memory preservation, erasure, or transformation into something new?

I see my work with floppy disks as a transformation, and in many ways a kind of collaboration with the unknown. Each disk once held personal data, but that information is now inaccessible—its contents erased by time and obsolescence.

Rather than prying into what was once there, I choose to honor the mystery of their past lives, allowing that absence to become part of the artwork itself. The disks carry traces of memory even without revealing their specifics, and that creates a powerful space for imagination and reinterpretation.

By painting on them, I’m not preserving the original data nor erasing it, but giving the object a new identity and purpose. In that sense, the art becomes a dialogue between past and present: a forgotten piece of technology reemerges as a vibrant surface for contemporary imagery.

What was once a vessel for private information is transformed into a shared cultural artifact, extending its life and meaning in a way its original users might never have imagined.

Many of your works retain visible labels or writing on the disks. Do you see these traces as an integral part of the work's narrative?

Yes, the labels and handwritten notes are essential to the narrative of the work. They carry with them the personal touch of the disk’s original user—whether a scribbled song title, a work project, or a simple numbering system.

Those marks hint at forgotten lives, gestures, and intentions, and I think of them as ghosts of memory that remain on the surface. By leaving them visible, I allow viewers to connect with the humanity of these objects, which were once deeply personal tools in daily life.

In the context of my paintings, those traces function like fragments of an unfinished story. They resist erasure and instead become part of the dialogue between the past and the present. I don’t see the disks as blank canvases; I see them as layered artifacts, where my imagery intersects with their original markings. The combination creates a tension between what was once private and what is now public, between data that has vanished and meaning that continues to evolve.

Nostalgia, technology, consumer culture, and sustainability intertwine in your practice. How do you balance homage to pop icons with a critique of consumerism?

My work has always been rooted in a deep awareness of nostalgia and cultural memory, but I approach those themes with equal parts admiration and critique. Pop icons—whether movie stars, athletes, or cultural symbols—represent the shared mythology of an era.

By placing them on surfaces like floppy disks or within the layered chaos of my Luxurious Disaster paintings, I pay homage to their impact while also questioning the forces of consumer culture that created them. The familiar becomes both celebratory and unsettling, inviting viewers to reflect on what we idolize and why.

At the same time, sustainability is central to my practice. By repurposing discarded materials, I’m intentionally challenging the throwaway mentality of consumerism. These obsolete objects, once mass-produced and quickly forgotten, are transformed into lasting works of art.

In that sense, the work operates on two levels: it honors the cultural touchstones that shaped us, while critiquing the cycles of excess and disposability that continue to define our world. The balance comes in allowing both truths to exist side by side—nostalgic reverence and sharp-eyed critique.

Do you see your art more as a personal reflection on memory or as a broader commentary on the relationship between society, technology, and waste?

For me, it is both deeply personal and broadly cultural. My interest in memory is rooted in my own family history—watching loved ones struggle with dementia and neurological illness shaped my awareness of how fragile memory can be.

That personal lens makes me sensitive to the traces and absences embedded in obsolete media, which carry a similar sense of loss and persistence. When I paint on floppy disks, I’m engaging with my own nostalgia as well as the universal experience of remembering and forgetting.

At the same time, the work inevitably extends into a larger commentary on our society’s relationship with technology and waste. Floppy disks are not just personal artifacts; they are also symbols of rapid obsolescence, mass production, and the environmental costs of consumer culture.

By repurposing them into art, I’m asking viewers to reconsider what we value, what we discard, and how memory—both human and technological—shapes our cultural identity. The personal and the collective are inseparable in my practice, and I see that tension as the heart of the work.

In some works, you've even used melted snow to draw attention to climate change. How important is activism in your creative process?

Activism is an essential part of my creative process because I believe art has the power to both raise awareness and embody change. The snow paintings began as a very personal gesture—I am passionate about skiing, snowy winters, and mountain life, and I wanted to find a way to materialize the urgency I feel about protecting them.

By inviting collaborators to send me vials of snow from their favorite high-altitude places, and then using that melted water in the paintings, each work becomes a record of a fleeting, endangered resource. Naming the paintings after the mountains where the snow originated ties the artwork back to those landscapes, making the connection between climate, memory, and fragility visible.

At the same time, I see these works as a call to action. A portion of the proceeds is donated to climate advocacy groups like Protect Our Winters (POW) and other organizations that fight for stronger policy change, because I believe artists have a responsibility to move beyond symbolism and contribute tangibly.

We are not taking climate change seriously enough, and I want my work to serve as both a celebration of snowy winters and a reminder of what we stand to lose. For me, activism isn’t separate from creativity—it is inseparable from how and why I make art.

You'll be presenting new works at Pando Fine Art on Labor Day. How does this series differ from your earlier floppy disk paintings?

The new paintings at Pando Fine Art in Park City, Utah, are very much a continuation of my exploration of the floppy disk works, but they expand the vocabulary of imagery in ways that are playful and personal to me.

While the earlier series focused on cultural icons and portraits, these new works introduce subjects like vintage automobiles, classic timepieces, and snow skiers reimagined as astronauts. They don’t differ radically from my previous Pop-inspired imagery, but they bring in new layers of nostalgia and humor, reflecting objects and motifs that I’m fascinated by in my own life.

In many ways, this series continues the same dialogue between memory, technology, and cultural myth, but it allows me to explore fresh subjects that feel both timeless and unexpected. By placing these objects on the surface of obsolete floppy disks, they become part of the same larger narrative about preservation, transformation, and cultural storytelling.

The result is a body of work that remains true to the themes I’ve been developing, while opening up new directions that are lighter, more playful, and deeply connected to my own passions.

Interview by Fabio Pariante, X • Instagram • Website

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Taylor Smith: Website • Instagram

From paintings made entirely of volcanic rock to his more recent kinetic sculptures and soundscapes, Bob Landström's practice is an investigation of mystery and the invisible. An Atlanta-based artist, Landström explores the liminal space between science and spirituality through works created with a unique process using crushed and pigmented volcanic rock.

His textural works, rooted in earthly elements, intertwine reflections on dreams, the language and sensibility of plants, quantum mechanics, and energetic vibrations. Today, his research has expanded into even more experimental territories, including sound sculptures made with harmonic bowls and even emu eggs. This fall, he will also participate in the GRIT group show at Alday Hunken Gallery in Atlanta.

The connection with volcanic rock was born almost by chance, as the artist himself explains:

“I first encountered volcanic rock in the desert of the Four Corners, where I was studying Native American petroglyphs. The landscape there is extraordinary — a place where the Earth feels close, big, pressing its presence into your bones”. And he specifies:

“That land also holds an ancient volcanic field, with dozens of vents dating back some 26 million years. I brought fragments of the rock home with no intention beyond curiosity, but its materiality took hold of me: once liquid within the Earth, now solid in my hands. That transmutation — from liquid to solid — felt like an elemental reminder of creation itself. One discovery led to another, and volcanic rock became an essential part of my practice”.

And then he adds: “Over the years, I’ve developed ways of grinding and pigmenting the rock as a painting medium, constantly evolving new techniques of application. In my experimental and experiential works, it often emerges as a character of its own, carrying the voice of something primordial, a personification of physical materiality”.

This encounter marked the beginning of an ever-evolving artistic journey, where matter, energy, and contemplation transform into images and sounds that open a space of inner resonance.

Your choice of earthy materials seems intertwined with a spiritual reflection: do you consider your process closer to science or meditation?

My studio practice is research-based, and to me, that is also a meditation, a way of understanding, empathizing, and interpreting. Meditating on what we see, hear, or feel is a way of becoming that thing, so that we can speak to it with some insight.

I tend to work in the interstice where science and metaphysics overlap, where they merge and become almost indistinguishable. I don’t follow the scientific method per se, but my process carries a similar spirit: What if it works this other way? What if this is what’s happening? What might it look like if we try this? Imagination leads to meditation, which leads to expression. Or, said differently, it’s rabbit-hole digging.

There is so much beauty and wonder in those esoteric concepts, and in the way we navigate them. That’s where the merging happens.

Lately, I’ve been focused on the idea of materiality: where it comes from, how it is formed, and where it goes. Earthy materials are central to that inquiry, as are the objects, sounds, or lights that reveal transmutations from nothingness to somethingness, from chaos to order — or back again.

In your works, we find references to dreams, the language of plants, and quantum mechanics: where does the inspiration to connect such diverse fields come from?

These ideas often arrive in ways I can’t quite explain. It feels like wandering through a forest and suddenly stumbling into a rabbit hole — unexpected at first, but in hindsight, probably the right destination at the time.

For example, when I was trying to grow mushrooms, I started reading about the mycelium networks fungi build underground. I learned that other plants connect into these networks to extend their own communication systems.

Then I discovered that plants release compounds into the air to signal to one another, and finally, I came across an article with recordings of plants making sounds. Can plants talk? That opened another rabbit hole.

That line of inquiry became Florum Somnia, a series of paintings exploring plant communication and even the notion of plant sentience. What do plants dream about? They’ve been on Earth far longer than we have — are we even measuring consciousness in the right way? In one installation from that series, I connected a resistance differential synthesizer to a ficus tree and let it play music.

Quantum mechanics is another wellspring of inspiration. Where to start? There’s an endless supply of brain food there. At one point, I became fascinated by the mathematics of parallel universes. The math shows they must exist, even if we don’t fully understand their nature. That led to my Multiverse series — paintings imagining what it might look like to step into one of those alternate worlds.

There’s no rubric to follow. For me, the topics just fall from the sky rather than me seeking them out. My curiosity draws them to me. If my curiosity is piqued, then I’m hooked and off we go.

What value does "spirituality" have for you? How do you experience it?

Spirituality has always been important to me. When I was younger, I studied esotericism, which gave me a perspective on how to experience the world. That influence has stayed with me.

It’s hard for me to separate the spiritual from anything else. It’s less a distinct practice than a lens through which I think and work. For me, spirituality is woven into the act of paying attention, of noticing, of being present with experience.

You often talk about frequencies and vibrations: how much do sound and the physics of energy influence your visual practice?

They’re foundational to my practice because they’re foundational to how I see physical reality. Everything has a vibration, and everything involves energy.

I often return to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which suggests that energy exists as a wave until it encounters observation, until it meets consciousness. In that moment, the wave collapses into particles, into the matter that makes up our shared physical world.

Lately, I’ve been drawn to electromagnetic static, through radios and field sensors. Static fascinates me, the way the mind begins to detect signals within noise, like finding familiar forms in clouds. Listening to it and watching as hidden signals surface feels like witnessing something in the process of becoming. At times, I wonder if static hints at a pre-manifestation state of physical reality, a threshold before things take form.

That exploration has carried into both painting and sound. Static appears on my canvases, but it also acts as the catalyst for sound works and kinetic sculpture. Working directly with electromagnetism has expanded my vision, bridging the auditory, the visual, and the experiential.

You have recently expanded your research into kinetic sculptures and soundscapes. How do these new works relate to your volcanic rock paintings?

They’re deeply connected. Sometimes a painting is the right vehicle for an idea, and sometimes another medium speaks more clearly. At times, a combination is what’s needed.

Whether it’s material, sound, or light, I approach them as different tools in a shared toolbox. The medium shifts, but the thread of my practice — the questions I’m pursuing — remains consistent.

This fall, you will be participating in the "GRIT" group show at Alday Hunken Gallery. Can you give us a preview of the works you will be presenting?

There’s a strong energy building around this show. I’ve met some of the other artists participating, and I’m looking forward to seeing it all come together.

I’ll be bringing three paintings, each from a different period of my practice. One is deeply meditative, another more playful, and the third carries a more spiritual and contemplative weight. Together, they give a sense of the range in my work.

Of course, grit is also literal in my case. My paintings are made from crushed volcanic rock, their surfaces coarse, labored, and bearing the history of their making. That physical grit mirrors the spirit of the show itself: the unglamorous, persistent labor of showing up in the studio day after day, even when no one is watching.

What would you like the audience's experience of your works to be? More sensorial, intellectual, or spiritual?

My pieces don’t usually carry an agenda. I’m not hiding a secret or asking the viewer to solve a puzzle. The elements are there for the experience itself, and that experience can play out differently for each person.

There is often an intellectual air to the work, since it is research-based and carefully constructed, but there’s no message to decode. Every response is valid. The works may emerge from a theory-heavy place, but they aren’t meant to be pedagogical.

The comment I hear most often is simple: “It just makes me feel good”. I can’t imagine a better compliment than that.

If you had to describe the spiritual experience you hope to convey through your work, what words would you use?

I hope the work invites a contemplative space, one that is humble yet elevating. At its best, it reveals something of the hidden order of things, a sense of being connected with the whole. Ultimately, I want the experience to affirm that each person’s path is their own, a journey of wonder, resonance, and belonging. If the work opens even a brief moment of stillness and recognition, that is enough.

Interview by Fabio Pariante, X • Instagram • Website

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Bob Landström: Website • Instagram

Massachusetts-based poet and artist Gordon Massman has transformed words into painting, maintaining the same expressive urgency that has guided his forty-five years of writing. His often monumental canvases emerge as unabashed confessions of the human psyche: instinctive, violent, yet lyrical gestures that combine vulnerability, irony, and sarcasm.

"I paint like a Kodiak bear attacking a fresh carcass", says the artist, emphasizing the brutal and liberating physicality of his creative gesture. From pure abstraction to references to religion, politics, mythology, and contemporary superheroes, his work thrives on multiple imagery and an uncompromising urgency.

For the GRIT exhibition at the Alday Hunken Gallery in Atlanta, Massman presents new works that confirm his vocation for a radical, emotional art capable of transforming personal pain into a universal language.

In this conversation, Gordon Massman retraces the transition from poetry to painting, talks about the need to shamelessly "confess" the shadows of the human soul, and reflects on the role of irony, rebellion, and memory in his artistic imagination.

You started as a poet, and now you're also a painter. How has writing poetry influenced your painting, and vice versa?

I ended my forty-five-year-long love affair with words when I realized that I could not arrange them more effectively than I already had. Words melted into paint, which I spun onto brushes to spread onto cloth. I now paint pictures with words exactly like I once wrote verse with paint: visually and primally.

Neither genre influences the other; one has merely shapeshifted into the next. Tarpon to condor, as it were. Whatever form it assumes, it’s the internal fire—the uncompromising passion within the beast--that creates the messages of art. I haul sunken ships from the depths regardless of the lifting machinery.

I am interested in those deepest sea-vines which unite human to human: fear, aggression, desperation, death, aloneness, vulnerability, endless hunger. That is my private obsession, and both words and paint are effective weapons.

In your works, you speak of "shameless confessions of the human psyche". What does it mean to you to lay bare this intimate part of yourself before an audience?

This may be the ultimate question, and I haven’t had to field it until now. Thank you for having the perspicacity to ask. Why do I so casually bare my pinkish nakedness to a prurient world? What weird engine drives this compulsion?

The instant the fender slices its chest, the wounded dog squeals. The instant the fisher cat sinks fangs into its heart, the victim’s shrieks scarify the night. Somewhere in time and space, the hunter’s arrow pierced my gut, and I began to scream. I have been screaming since. I do not paint for glory or to win the temporary recognition of strangers.

I create to heal myself and, frankly, it doesn’t work. Think of Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Rothko, Gorky, and Jackson Pollock, who yanked out their mouths frayed clotheslines of personal laundry. All died by their hands. They, and I, bought the myth of religious exorcism, of sanctified cauterization. Yet it seems to be the only path.

The word “shameless”, which I am quoted to describe my “confessions of the human psyche”, I intend literally. We must extinguish the shame of who we most rightly are beneath the striations. Have no shame for painful lust; have no guilt for murderous flashes; never apologize for insecurity.

All quite normal subterranean denizens. Love these traits, and if you must, pry them open to the world. Religion and its social counterparts have built invisible electric prisons of shame around our perfectly normal fantasies. Celebrate, not supplicate. I’m a celebrant of my vertical stations.

You've described your painting as that of a "Kodiak bear attacking a fresh carcass"; can you tell us more about this physicality of the pictorial gesture?

In the Kodiak Peninsula of southern Alaska reside the biggest brown bears in the world. They can snatch the salmon from its ladder, as if it, the salmon, were standing still. This beast cares not a whit for chinaware; it splashes guts everywhere, scarlets its snout, and leaves a reeking slaughter zone.

Lumbers off for fresher uncivilized kill. Its gut growls through its swords. Each hind leg weighs fifteen hundred pounds, two stacks of cannonballs. I am he, symbolically. I crucify the massive canvas to my wall with staples, then unleash my primal instinct. Upon it, I describe twelve-foot-high bleeding arcs and scrawls and fat claw slashes and insatiable appetite.

I un-dignify it with my nightmare secrets—my grandeur delusions, my sexual appetite, my self-destruction, my base addictions. I am liberated and fear no incrimination.

But here’s the miracle, the unexpected metamorphosis: I give life to the thing I kill. The more I assault, the fresher it grows until at last it bawls its being into the world. I FINALLY AM AND AM DANG-ER-OUS! LOOK OUT WORLD!!! By eating prey, to my very victim I bestow life, a bizarre consequence.

Every one of my paintings breaks the sack, leaving messes everywhere—mountains of tubes, buckets of brushes, bloody rags, empty wrappers, bones of wood, empty shoes, paint-stiff, urine-stained discarded pants, thermal cups, all upon a slimy liquid floor.

I leave the studio at five o’clock with my back fur smoking. At home, I hit a joint and, satiated, lounge about. And it was good.

You speak to the painting, insult it, even throw brushes at it. What is the function of this aggressive dialogue with the work as it's being created?

I throw at it my favorite curses: “fuck you”, “go fuck yourself”, “go to hell”, speaking not to the innocent thing upon the wall but to the entire guilty world. Underlying these execrations, I am shouting to schools of art, critics, professors, the strictures and boundaries artists have been cautioned not to cross.

I also shout into the room: “Idiot”, “Nutcase”, “Piece of shit”, referring exclusively to myself. I self-abuse. I never curse the innocent, the baby, the fragile angel: the canvas itself. My painting is tender and sacrosanct. It’s the wrathful adults, including myself, whom I curse, red-faced, venous, sometimes trembling.

Religion, politics, ancient mythology, and even contemporary superheroes emerge in your paintings. How do these very different worlds intertwine in your artistic imagination?

I’m a frappe, my brain a billion thoughts and images blended into smooth consistency. I swallow nicely.

Ingredients range from a concentration camp, a woman’s foot, a starving kid, my sister’s hypochondria, my parents’ tongues, a chameleon lizard pasted upon a red brick wall cannonballed by a BB gun, hurricanes and pregnant surf, a dirty thumb, a severed beet, the whole bloody carousel of life upon this grizzled earth.

They whir into themselves: priests, Superman, Medusa’s head, everything I’ve seen or heard or think I know. How such tasty, fattening things influence my art, I cannot say.

A mythological or religious figure that inspires you the most?

Icarus for his damned rebellion, and Odysseus for his faithful quest.

Your subjects are often "psychologically disturbed", but always accompanied by a sense of irony and subtle humor. What is the role of laughter (bitter or sarcastic) in your art?

Think of a Maersk megaship gliding by a doomed, unseen man marooned on a wooden box in the dead center of the Atlantic Ocean. At such pitiless irony, he bursts out laughing. At some point after a disaster, some people get the joke.

I get the joke. I often inhale after some personal horror helium air and squeak into the universe my bitter, sarcastic laughter. Humor makes failure tolerable. So horrible are the guts I often smear on canvas, I sometimes become a sniggering jackal.

But I must ameliorate. I paint light subjects, too. And counterintuitively, they often make me cry.

Your canvases are monumental in scale, almost "unsuitable" for conventional spaces. Is this an aesthetic choice or an act of rebellion against the concept of art as a living room object?

Manic Depression OCD, lovelessness, and hatred, slicing through my childhood house, stuffed me into a tiny box. It was scary, suffocating, soul-annihilating. These big canvases cry, “I will no longer be confined,” and become the sails of my escape and the skies under which I fly.

You will be participating in the “GRIT” exhibition with Alday Hunken Gallery in Atlanta in October. What does this opportunity mean to you, and what new things will we find in the works on display?

Onto plywood planks and blocks of wood, I screwed, ripping, cutting, drilling, slicing, gouging, pressuring, smashing antique woodworking and farming implements along with chains, wire, sprockets, and nails, painted them black, and swirled them about Donald Trump’s diabolical head to symbolize his sadistic brain. I removed a screw from its hole to make his eye. An A-Frame scaffold painted blue on six steel wheels shoulders this into place.

Under no delusions of affecting political or social change, my personal catharsis created this piece. When has art ever stanched the flow of authoritarianism or won back freedoms lost? Not Picasso’s Guernica or Basquiat’s skulls or Ono’s bed-ins or Haring’s cartoons or even Francisco Goya’s Third of May have stopped the slaughter of ethnic cleansing, war, starvation, and iron-fisted dictatorialism. Art is reactive, not propulsive.

This piece will galvanize some and repulse others. I care not which. It merely represents my abhorrence of current affairs and concretizes my boiling catharsis.

Looking ahead, do you think your research will continue to evolve, or will it remain anchored to this dimension of spontaneity and emotional urgency?

I am always becoming but never become-d. Humans freeze frames of themselves from the film of life, which unfailingly end with death, and call it “I”. Today I make big emotional abstract paintings, but tomorrow, should the gods decree, spot me easel painting ascending hot air balloons or stacks of lobster traps. Only evolution knows. Anchored in spontaneity and emotional urgency, in likelihood I will remain, but I glide through life with arms wide open.

Interview by Fabio Pariante, X • Instagram • Website

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Gordon Massman: Website • Instagram

Tell us what you do and your beginnings.

I am a contemporary realist painter working primarily with oil and graphite. My paintings explore the duality between the physical state of reality and our inner space, the unconscious, memory, and the fragile perception of existence.

Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by reality itself, by the simple yet impossible question of how everything around us even exists, and how we each interpret it in our own way. That sense of awe has never left me; it became the foundation of my artwork.

Later, while studying industrial design, I deepened my skills in observation and realistic drawing. From the beginning, realism felt like the most natural way for me to communicate. I experimented with different styles, but they always felt like trying to speak in a foreign language.

Realism, with all its imperfections and possibilities, became my authentic voice. It allows me to communicate emotions and ideas in the most honest way I know. Over time, my focus has shifted from pure precision to atmosphere, depth, and the contemplative space that lies beyond the visible surface.

What does your work aim to say?

My work speaks through duality. On one hand, I use the precise language of realism, an attempt to capture the physical state of things, the awe of reality itself. On the other hand, I’m interested in what lies beyond the visible, our inner space, the unconscious, the shifting states of mind that shape how we perceive existence.

For me, a painting is not simply about reproducing what is in front of me, but about creating a space where these two dimensions overlap, the tangible and the intangible, the ordinary and the profound. Even though my paintings may appear realistic, they are in essence abstract: stripped of narrative, emptied of event, they offer instead a quiet place for reflection.

What I aim to say is not a fixed message, but an invitation: to pause, to contemplate, to notice how reality and inner reality coexist in fragile balance.

I translate this duality into my work through the coexistence of paradoxes. Old architecture standing beside modern features, traces of decay revealing the passage of time, romantic light in contrast to harsh, raw environment, and so on.

These details carry a subtle nostalgia, reminding us that reality is never fixed but layered, shifting, fragile. By observing these juxtapositions, I invite the viewer to contemplate their own perception of existence, how past and present, material and mental, constantly intertwine.

Where do you find inspiration for your art?

I usually find inspiration in my own surroundings, in overlooked corners, in the traces of time on architecture, and in the ordinary details of daily life. These fragments interest me because they leave space for contemplation. They are not about telling a clear story, but about holding a question, an atmosphere, or a feeling that cannot be fully explained.

The bittersweet reality of everyday life is an endless source of inspiration. I seek out ordinary scenes and objects that, in some way, reflect my inner state, my thoughts, and my perception of the world. What might seem mundane on the surface often carries multiple layers of meaning for me, sometimes even paradoxes.

I’m drawn to scenes that quietly speak about something deeper: tension, stillness, vulnerability, or contradiction, and through painting, I try to bring those hidden dimensions to the surface.

I love wandering through cities with no destination in mind. Observing people, architecture, and unexpected details that often spark new ideas. These small, unplanned experiences often find their way into my work.

Sometimes it’s just a walk through the neighborhood, sometimes it’s a journey abroad, but the principle is the same: inspiration comes from direct experience.

A fleeting atmosphere, the way light falls on a wall, or the silent passage of time marked on a building can all open up that space of reflection I aim to capture.

I’m not drawn to polished or overly perfect things. What inspires me are raw, simple, often incomplete subjects, moments, or places that resist clear interpretation. I look for scenes that carry a vague, uncertain idea rather than a fully defined statement, because that mirrors how I see reality itself, never absolute, always layered and ambiguous.

Could you give us some insight into your creative process?

When I find inspiration, a subject that I feel can translate my intention, I begin by gathering reference material: photographs, sketches, drawings. Then I often set it aside, sometimes even for a year or more. My paintings take a long time to create, so I must be certain about the subject and the composition before I even approach the canvas.

Giving the idea time is crucial; it allows me to return to it with fresh eyes and test whether it still holds its power. If the subject continues to resonate, if I feel it has enough strength to carry a painting, I then choose the scale, prepare the surface, and finally begin the work.

From there, the process becomes a balance between careful planning and the unpredictability of painting itself, a dialogue between control and accident, where each step pushes the painting toward its final form. My process is both carefully planned and open to accident; the medium resists control, colors shift, textures surprise, and accidents happen.

I’m always looking for a balance between control and chance, between order and spontaneity. A rag, a palette knife, or even a slip of the brush can completely shift the mood of a work. Every painting teaches me something new, not only technically, but also about patience, perception, and my own state of mind.

For me, the process is less about “finishing” a painting and more about letting it reach a point where reality and abstraction coexist, where the work feels alive but still leaves space for uncertainty and reflection.

What are your future projects?

My future projects are less about specific subjects and more about continuing the dialogue I have with reality, its fragility, contradictions, and hidden layers. I want to keep exploring how painting can hold both clarity and ambiguity at once.

At the same time, I already have several paintings in mind that I’m preparing to work on, each of them carrying this same search for balance between the visible and the hidden.

Interview by Fabio Pariante, X • Instagram • Website

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