The Mondino Method and Eleven Beauties in the Landscapes of Etruria
I approach Mondino as the figure who moved the human body from the church’s deathbed into a space of inquiry. The anatomical theatre is my circumstance: a place where the manifestations of the unconscious are set upon a table and calmly opened, with the thirst of a discoverer and an unflinching immersion in the subject. Canvas is that research table. Onto it I release what I draw from the sacred interior of experience and from my vision of human history. The paintings become a figurative narration that exposes psycho-emotional states and touches the sacred alongside the sacrilegious. I train my gaze on the zones that frighten me most and sustain the look long enough for tenderness to appear, so that the viewer may risk an encounter with their own inner creature.
The cycle unfolds around a central canvas, Salome, where the motif of decapitation turns into a paradoxical icon of humility and maternal wonder.
— Veil, Brothers, and Game with a Black Head —
This triptych explores sadism entangled with redemption and metamorphosis. The composition stages a hermaphrodite whose face is veiled in diaphanous cloth, a boy in congress with a serpent, and Siamese twins, all set before a field of proliferating golden heads. The figures trace phases of ithyphallic force and the mutation of psychic states through the prisms of gender and embodied experience. Corporeal imagery is used for entry: it opens a passage into the contradictions of identity and change. The visual narrative articulates the knot of forgiveness and punishment and follows the evolution of the self across a meticulously layered tableau.
The graphic cycle preceded this project and partly threads through it as an auto-erotic diary, The Gutta-Percha Son of Stone Fathers and an Iron Mother: a visually poetic exploration of dream-worlds and a revision of biographical events. In these drawings I practise a language of the body—dislocations, dance, acts of severance and a specific plasticity—set within a thanato-erotic register. Images write themselves and breathe like a beast newly emerged from sleep, timid or fully twisted, ready at once to meet the viewer. I work with watercolour and dry media, ink, charcoal, sanguine, and earth pigments such as hematite and ochre, using calligraphy brushes, sticks and other “improper” tools. I seek the transparency of layered paint and the fragile, almost fresco-like surface that dry material yields on canvas. The technical choice serves the theatre: the surface must feel as vulnerable as skin on the table.
Sculptural and ceramic elements extend the iconography.
A Pietà stages a collision between the birth of Athena and the Christian canon, returning the figure to the womb of mourning.
The Sphinx Plays with Two Black Heads keeps a secret and withholds names even from the gods.
The Appearance of the Third Head shows the coitus of an empty being and a hermaphrodite: a metamorphosis where eros passes beyond duality and becomes a single, new thing.
Two paintings under the sign of Pasiphaë extend the knot of violence and fertility.
In Gifts of the Three-Faced Father a boy, a youth and an old man feed a silent girl with pomegranates — psychopompic fruit that holds passage, oblivion and rule, the seed taken into a woman’s body.
A boy, a youth and an elder feed a mute girl with pomegranates. The first canvas of the “Projections” diptych, it shows the silent acceptance of offerings from a tripartite presence. “Feeding with pomegranates” becomes a precise metaphor: gods remain indifferent to what is laid upon their altars, whether charred flesh or spilled blood. The fruit acts as a psychopomp, signalling oblivion and passage through gates, fecundity and the will to rule; it is also the seed received by the feminine body, an image that unsettles the nurturing cliché of feeding with a consenting undertow. Violence here gathers into a paradoxical comfort of acquiescent surfaces, binding discordant elements into a coherent—if disquieting—whole.
In Mother, Two Ram Heads and Consequences
Motherhood’s nurture meets the steady pressure of chromosome and the sober reality of birth. The blessing of fertility, by its own paradox, becomes a herald of mortality. Two sacrificial ram heads invoke Egyptian solar mythology, where the sun-deity, entering the realm of shadow, takes the aspect of an aged figure bearing four ram heads. Through this lens the painting examines creation and destruction, life and death, and the cyclical texture of existence. The sacrificial image, layered with mythic allusion, underscores the consequence braided into every act of making: benevolence bound to tragic inevitability.
The olfactory component belongs to ODIOSA and is titled Unbearable. It begins with the scorch of fire and the tang of metal, a chill of air and a hint of animal. The composition is poetic and meditative in its development, upfront and unruly at the opening.
Among the notes: hawthorn, earth, wormwood, cardamom and pepper; candle soot, petitgrain and marigold; water-lily, galbanum, violet, tobacco and peat; tar, mignonette, rose and fig; opoponax, magnolia absolute, tonka bean, iris, vanilla absolute, castoreum and spice. If the scent were filmed from a drone, it would appear as a cluster of wolf cubs asleep on a dying fire, ringed by a centuries-old marsh; in the thicket, foreign naiads dance in a circle, their breath coppered as they sing, their breasts garlanded with champaca, their bodies lit like hot iron.
The object The Many-Eyed Bull’s Head – Anchor sits at the centre of this assemblage. The head is hollow and ready to act as an instrument of transformation; the mythologem carries readings from Osirian cults to the bull-headed Minotaur. A perfume vial placed at the “mouth” anchors the inner metamorphosis that arises from contact with ascending layers of meaning, while a “heart” set at the feet operates as a pendulum-anchor to invite trance and sustained contemplation.
A plywood work, Beloved Son, fixes an image of confusion in the womb, where the primary demons of hunger, fear, attack and rage coagulate around a beloved child taking shape.
A red canvas, Marsyas Eats His Skin above the Ithyphallic Figure of Resting Apollo.
Three small canvases—Mary’s Journey to Egypt, The Three Moods of Persephone, The Game of Two Sphinxes — trace my recurring familiars of the symbolic field.
