After high school, I studied at the Department of Scenography of the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where I was born and lived my formative years. Though I have experimented with many painting techniques over the years, Indian ink remains the preferred method for my graphics.
FOLK ART
My artistic production has definitively converted to folk art and the humble, instinctive, and simplified representation of life and work.
My figures are simple, stereotyped, and often repeated as modules, aiming to exalt their intimate symbolic meaning, for immediate and direct communication with the viewer (i.e. with a direct reference meaning, allegorical meaning of medieval miniatures, just to mention one of the sources to which I am indebted
Excessive realism runs the risk of leading toward an apologia, an exaltation of complex, difficult conditions of life and work, which, on the contrary, are too often narrated as idealized and sublimated (I refer, for example, to peasant culture).
The large hands, the main tool of hard, strenuous work, force the figures into a general dysmorphism, which breaks all rules of anatomical and compositional proportion and which recalls the Naif experience, in a context of perspective and compositional simplification.
The clothing refers to specific historical periods only in some cases and for small details, while all the tools and implements are faithfully reproduced, taken from the endless bibliography and iconography available.
Finally, the drapery has the task of giving final form to the figures; static figures, often almost in a photographic pose, so that each viewer, in that intimate dialogue with the work, chooses and “snaps” his or her favorite frame.
NOBODY’S STORIES
Therefore, it is not my intention to faithfully reproduce the iconography of a specific historical period but to create immediately legible, naïve, and almost grotesque figures to tell small, simple, humble, but noble stories. Those stories of all Mr./Mrs. Nobody made solemn and stopped in time, in their simple ritual repetitiveness. Or even to create individual scenes of an ideal theatrical performance, where to represent those who had the most hidden, and least visible parts from the script of life: the hardest and quietest parts behind the scenes of the great stage of History.
Although less noticeable, these poor people have been often decisive and certainly not less noble than those who have taken their place on the proscenium.
CURTAIN DOWN
I hope to give a small contribution to ensure that the beauty of those lives is not forgotten, but rather welcomed with the same attention given to the protagonists, in the progression of this marvelous and mysterious representation of life; because, when the curtain comes down and the stage clothes/masks are removed, we all find ourselves feeling the same fears, joys, anxieties, enjoyments, sufferings, delights,
demons, pleasures, doubts, and pains, “which begin in the lap of a mysterious wailing and end in an equally mysterious eternal sleep”… and the ticking of remembrance remains in the silence, for those who still recite their vigil.
MY STUDIO
My studio is a "workshop" of unique experiences.
Over the years I have met a hard-to-calculate number of women, men, young, and elderly – from all parts of the world – who stopped by my "workshop" and exchanged ideas, opinions, impressions, and advice in a continuous and mutual enrichment. I had the opportunity to see beautiful works of “amateur” artists, and
draughtsmen-travelers, often little shown and guarded with modesty; artists for passion, leisure, and entertainment of extraordinary ability, mastery, and skill.
It was one of the goals I had set for myself from the beginning: to limit outside exhibitions to a minimum and to focus my work on a place of knowledge and exchange. With my new studio in Sarteano, I hope to humbly replicate my Siena experience, aware that I have much to learn, and that “It is good to rub and
polish our brains with those of others” (Michel de Montaigne).