About the Artist
As an architecture graduate, I'm much influenced by the forms and rational structure of urban landscapes. These combinations of surfaces, materials and geometric compositions, as well as the relationship between light and its reflections, are my main sources of inspiration. Most of my works are oil on canvas and I usually use particularly emotional tones, shades of color linked to different moods, largely referring to the tradition of the artistic Avant-gardes.
I use to depict scenes in every conceivable light, from glowing romantic sunsets to nighttime gothic scenes. These suggestive and iconic scenes are accentuated by bold, rapid brushstrokes, which stain the surface, superimposing definite and decisive signs made in ink. Depending on the time of day or weather conditions, my palette can contain fantastic grays, intense blacks and blues, then bright gusts of pink, yellow and orange.
The urban landscapes are rendered with intimate tones and dynamic traces. Many compositions are inspired by the most hidden spaces and facades of the city, where the reflected buildings, the colors of the street lamps and the neon signs shine in the rain or are illuminated by the sun. Each work represents a city with intensity and personality, the time of the work is the time and the unique situation of a special moment of the day. I travel around the world and it helps me to broaden my views, to overcome my creative limitations and to use my artistic practice for a variety of themes and unique subjects.
Currently my work is exhibited in the UK and United States and in many other locations in the world.
My paintings arise as instruments capable of modulating and fragmenting the light beam, the chiaroscuro impresses on the canvas city views that vanish into perspective and turn into dreamlike scenarios. As in a dream, I recompose images of the cities I've passed through, transcribing on canvas the snapshots of moments in which natural and artificial light highlights the characteristics of the urban space.
The common denominator of the paintings is the light, an elegant one able to create particularly dense and unrepeatable atmospheres for each landscape: “Light is the main player of all my works although it has a unique effect on each of them. The subject of light gives me the opportunity to expand and extend my limits to different places and themes, painting the main elements of the urban landscape: the invisible ones that change the face of things”.
To give life to my works full of light, I use to modify the ancient technique of overlapping the layers of color: with quick and synthetic brushstrokes I suggest the idea of reverberation, of the diffused glow of the warm sunsets or of the gloomy metropolitan days where the water becomes a mirror by multiplying the light rays. I am mainly painting wet on wet, without letting the layers dry completely, to create new layers by working with transparent colors thus creating a combination of luminous, transparent, reflected and obscured facades that restore the richness of each view.
The structuring role of light redefines shapes and surfaces giving life to clean and solid volumes. The formal outcome of the buildings' facades characterizes the architectural language of the different longitudes to which they refer and document their living culture. The vertical and horizontal lines, curves and wisely harmonized geometries give life to an architectural language, almost stenographic, where the useful and the beautiful symmetrically agree.
Finally, in my works, the light describes and reveals but also has the ability to slow down time. Time is the dimension that completes the vision, giving back to the viewer the sensations of that pause for reflection in which everything is reduced and the colors and noises diminish.
“For me the influence of light on the urban space and its internalization is a challenge I have to overcome with each of my paintings.
As a cityscape painter the main issue is to find balance and somewhat contradiction between street front and the lining masses- often the meeting of these two concludes in drama or strong contrast and sometimes ideal scenery takes place.
This happens when light influences and conducts the urban space at every hour of the day.
The vision is to reach trough art to urban space where natural and artificial light has decisive influence on the subject urban space character at a various times.
The observer is drawn to place and time of the scenery as if he is truly there,
Feeling the weather, blinded by the street and traffic light, tasting the atmosphere.
The artworks occur in various places around the world, with different mentality,
different history and different architectural language.
All the artworks have one thing in common, the light is the main player, although
It has a unique effect on each and every one of them, such effect that creates
a mixture of lighted/ transparent /reflected or darken building fronts.
All this happens thanks to the influence of natural light during the day and changes to moonlight /artificial light during the night.
Work technique in layers as was common in the past, is in fact applied here as well, with minor changes as I work wet on wet without letting the layers dry completely, and this to create new layers by working with transparent colours.
All this is done to give the observer the opportunity to translate the puzzled pieces as he understands.
The source of the theme chosen mostly come from adapted photographs to a point where
It increases and intensifies the atmosphere.
The subject of light gives me the opportunity to expand and extend my limits, to different places and themes.
There is no limit or zone to an urban space to a specific place and time, it can take place on
a single alley in a small village or on a hectic boulevard in a big city or on a fisherman's Warf.
The painting tools consist of, bold brushes, staining the surface, wiping away paint with solvent, gritty marks with an ink brayer.
In my point of view the artwork is the curiosity for searching the appropriate ingredients in the urban space, which are mostly unseen by the naked eye and overlooked because of their banality.
For glorifying the everyday life and everyday scene by pointing out that the way you look at it can give it a special personal touch of feelings, memories, dreams of the past and future.
The search for such special details arouses curiosity – it can be defined as cracking the code for the urban space appearance."
