Risvegli

This is a series of oil paintings, mostly in black and white. They arise from sketches made around the city, museums and from photographic image research. Made with technique ¨Blind Contour Drawing¨, Umanoidi is a sincere mirror of how I see the metropolitan world wrapped in a darkness that is illuminated only by the human figure.

Story of this Painting

In the dense silence of a timeless background, something has just happened — or is only now finishing happening. On the left, the three Crosses of Lorraine lie piled together like tools set aside after a performance has ended, or perhaps before it begins. They are no longer symbols, no longer signs of faith or power: they resemble rods, levers, puppeteer’s sticks abandoned, still trailing thin threads that drip downward like the residue of a control just severed. They have lost their sacred verticality; now they are horizontal, inert, almost dismantled. They guide nothing anymore.

On the right, three humanoid figures — not entirely human, not entirely other — sit as if just awakened from a millennial sleep. Their bodies are solid and yet soft, sculpted and distorted at once, as though matter itself has not yet decided to settle. They look upward with an expression suspended between astonishment and bewilderment, like creatures who have opened their eyes for the first time but have not yet received instructions.

Who freed them?

Their hands grasp nothing. No visible strings hold them. And yet something suggests that only a moment before they existed merely as extensions of those crosses, as puppets without consciousness. Now, deprived of command, they remain still, prisoners of a sudden freedom. The gesture of the first — a hand at the chin — seems like a clumsy attempt to think. The second leans, as if searching for a new balance. The third holds a sphere, perhaps a heart, perhaps a burden, perhaps the world itself, unsure whether to protect it or let it fall.

Are they dissolving? Or are they forming?

The light that shapes them is ambiguous: it does not truly illuminate them, it reveals them halfway, like apparitions that might vanish if someone stopped looking. They are not ghosts, yet not fully present either. They exist at the precise point where being and non-being touch.

Perhaps they are a trinity, but without dogma. Three aspects of the same newly born consciousness: thought, doubt, the weight of existence. Or they may be the remnants of a deactivated humanity, survivors of their own system of control. Or perhaps they are actors left on stage after the director has departed, forced to improvise without a script.

The painting does not tell a triumphant awakening. It tells the most fragile moment: the instant when one realizes one is alive but does not know why, nor what to do next.

The crosses no longer guide.
The threads hang without tension.
And the creatures, finally free, discover that freedom can feel very much like bewilderment.

Perhaps they are not dissolving.
Perhaps they are learning to exist without being moved.