"E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare"
(And being shipwrecked is sweet to me in this sea)

Sensual pleasure or inevitable apnea? 
Life or death?

A woman floating into the water .... An image that has been brought to life from my recurring dream. It's the visual metaphor of the instant on the edge between life and death, pleasure and pain. Ambiguous moment of a subtle contrast.

Water that embraces and cradles like an amniotic fluid ... benign, origin of life, feminine element par excellence, but at the same time a disturbing and uncontrollable water one can not escape. Water, powerful force of nature as well as the dark seabed of the human soul.

Woman and water joined together in a soft and sensual mutual embrace, at the same time inevitably suffocating. My work explores this ambiguous and contrasting embrace like in a snapshot frozen in time, a hug that could last forever in the eternity of the death or melt away after an instant in the awakening to life.

The title of this work is a quotation from a verse of the famous Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, whose romantic melancholy, perfectly expresses the dual nature of the abandonment, suspended between the final defeat and the long-awaited achievement of inner peace.

I've used mixed media technique merging together photo-transfer with pouring acrylic paint.
Photo-transfer to let the viewer perceive the scene as something real and possible, while the pouring acrylic paint recalls the behaviour and the fluid nature of water.