Experimental Portraits (Tricolor & Toning Cyanotype)

Tri-color cyanotype layered over single-color cyanotypes carbonated and toned to coffee and green tea, over other Tri-color cyanotype, 15x21x3сm.
My generation was born in a very prosperous, peaceful and serene period of history. One observed the world with wonder and hope, there were no world wars, economic crises, climatic crises or hard-to-digest dramas…we were born lucky, everything was growing and stretching towards infinity. The events of the past few years have created an escalation of terror and anxiety within us, and I believe that not being used to it, we have suffered a deep crisis regarding our confidence of the future. We have seen our parents grow in employment and create economic stability exponentially, and now we don’t know when our children will be able to afford even a room to rent in a small to medium-sized town. We have experienced the expansion of our rights and now we watch them one by one fade away. We used to have vacation vacations that lasted months and now to afford a weekend away we have to work all year round. Food is very expensive and for a visit to the gastroenterologist if you are out of money, you have to wait 15 months, we are collapsing, war is advancing, viruses, global warming. It’s normal that then our mind tries to protect itself from this constant state of alertness by pushing thoughts away and making us live a sluggish, sleepy, slumbering everyday life, making this anxiety grow in us and then we can’t explain it…. And we pay for psychotherapy sessions to figure out how to move on… and digest it all…
Maybe it would be worth it after all to try to live well, as much as we can, to change our perspective and be reborn, to believe in the connectedness of all things again, to be active again, to take off the auto navigator. I don’t know how, I’m still thinking about it, do you guys have any ideas?

 

 

Tri-color cyanotype layered over single-color cyanotypes turned to coffee and matcha tea, 15x21x3cm.
It’s hard to stand still and watch your blood fizzle, often you wish you didn’t see, didn’t feel, didn’t suffer.
When your heart explodes…when you put your whole soul and get hurt….

 

Tri-color cyanotype layered over single-color cyanotypes toned with matcha and carbonate, 15x21x3cm.
And we return with a self-portrait, to understand better…to see better…to evolve.
In the West, we often see life as a climb toward success, toward enlightenment, toward a goal that at some point will accord us value….
It would be nice to live just for the sake of living, to see for the sake of observing and to be for the sake of being….
There is nothing complex about serenity; it is the antithesis of the entangled thinking we carry within us. Life is how you live it…

 

                                                 Tri-color cyanotype layered over single-color cyanotypes turned to coffee and matcha tea, 15x21x3cm.                                                                                                         I have no words, I am really so much in love with this piece! I feel it is the beginning of something else…. He speaks for himself!!!

 

Tri-color cyanotype layered over single-color cyanotypes toned with matcha and carbonate, 15x21x3cm.
Head whipping and not stopping, does growing really follow a linear path or is it just a succession of changes? Time goes on and on and cannot be stopped, only images fix time, but then the way you will look at them changes…
What a surprise to find out how you will look at the world, I wish I could be there to smile with you.

 

Tricolor cyanotype layered on carbonated and green tea-tinted monochrome cyanotypes, 15x21x3cm.
In these days we have witnessed the death of the pope and I find myself thinking about the great symbolic meaning that so many people have given to a human being…it happens often with religious hierarchies but also with movie myths, politicians and often even with less influential people…they are people like us, they breathe, sleep and eat like us, they cry and laugh like us…but we often associate them with an ideal and think they are made only of air and divine. I find this natural tendency to idolize very curious, we are strange animals, what do you think?

 

Tri-color cyanotype layered on carbonated single-color cyanotypes and green tea turn, 15x21x3cm.
Do you ever feel compressed? Like there is something inside you that wants to burst out? And then when it comes out it bursts out like a hurricane in a pressure cooker?
Sometimes it is difficult to even communicate to yourself what you feel… What you want… Where you would like to be… What you would like to do… Who you would like to be… And who we are instead.

 

To think think think think think and arrovolare again, looking for something more, more than what we already have….
And why? Out of a sense of duty, out of responsibility or perhaps just out of fear, fear of living.
And yet the horizon is always there if you lift your eyes for a moment and try to look at it….
Look at the sky how blue it is! Look at the sea, look around and smile.

 

Tri-color cyanotype layered over single-color cyanotypes turned to coffee and green tea, 15x21x3cm. Selfportrait
Finding oneself living with one’s changing body is an experience as natural as it is complex, the eyes grow tired, the chin recedes, the teeth clench, and the skin changes shapes…and the mind delays in understanding this process, initially undergoing it and then slowly making it its own, even though we all have in our hearts and eyesight previous versions of ourselves and sometimes they are a little lacking…
When we finally accept the time that has passed through us here we have to begin and metabolize the change again as a path that is not yet finished.

 

 

Tri-color cyanotype layered on carbonated single-color cyanotypes turned to green tea, 15x21x3cm.
Sometimes I look at people and see them as little walking worlds, independent realities that move, see, experience in their own little ways….
In light of this, how can I think that there is an objective reality? How can I think that what I experience is what someone else experiences? The only thing I think we all experience in a similar way is the emptiness that starts in our belly, that emptiness that we would like to fill with objects, relationships, addictions, entertainment and any activity. We would like to fill it because to keep the hard voice, it would push us to look inside, to suffer from our mistakes and shortcomings, but most of all we would suffer from our missed expectations. And so perhaps we are actually little illusions wandering the world.

 

Tri-color cyanotype layered on carbonated and green tea-tinted single-color cyanotypes on tracing paper, 15x21x3cm.
It would be nice to be naked, free from masks and conditioning, but when I think about it I am reminded of Pirandello’s “One, No One and a Hundred Thousand” and I realize that our masks are also part of us, they are not strange strangers who take over our decisions…and even when we think we have taken the wrong path…well that previous us chose what was good for him…if we are like a hundred thousand in one there are no wrong choices but only choices of a previous self to the one who now finds them wrong.

 

Tri-color cyanotype layered over single-color carbonated and coffee-tinted cyanotypes, 15x21x3cm.
There are certain times when a thought that creeps into your mind and doesn’t leave, stays there will take root grows bigger and bigger, so much so that then at some point you have to stop and remember to breathe and then in a moment the truth materializes in front of you. In my opinion with the truth is to hold on to because it is the fruit of 1000 tribulations in the spirit.

 

Coffee-tinged single-color cyanotype layered on Green tea and coffee-tinged carbonated single-color cyanotype, 15x21x3cm.
Strand upon strand, between paper and flesh, the cocoon is being built… You know when you live life often the sorrows are so many or so great that you end up identifying life and identifying yourself with what we call malaise… Well, sometimes you have to stop and observe, even if it’s difficult, even if the problems seem insurmountable try to look around, to understand that everything goes on anyway. So now I wrap myself in a cocoon and wait for maturity.

 

 

Tri-color cyanotype layered over carbonated single-color cyanotypes with green tea tint, 15x21x3cm.
All the energy we release into the world comes back to us at the same level, if we can vibrate high the vibrations we receive will be high, if we vibrate low they will come back low. Having said that what would happen if enough people in the world vibrated high? What could we accomplish for the good of ourselves and our planet? What would happen if we realized that what this century of fake democracies has taught us about individuality is wrong? How much could we change things by all vibrating together with the same energy? What if we vibrated with the energy of the earth?

 

Duotone cyanotype layered on Carbonated Cyanotypes and turned to coffee, 15x21cm, one piece.
It’s like a perpetual sleep, can you hear the snoring?
We sleep! We do not know! We rely on! We were taught to think uselessness!
And now everything falls and we don’t know what to do.
Disillusionment, a system that has peaked and is now imploding in itself! My thoughts at times have been hard and difficult to digest I know!
But then a yawn happens!
Terrifying at first…
Then the distant feeling that there is more, that there is more in us. Perhaps a glimmer of energy moving us, an energy all ours but also all yours, all mine and all yours, pushing to join its atoms and its consciousness…a collective consciousness?
Maybe yes, maybe no. We shall see…

 

Tri-color cyanotype layered on single-color cyanotypes turned to madder root, 15x21x3cm.
We would probably need to be able to dream, to be able to hope for a better future, we would need wings to attach to our hearts to be free. I believe that even if we feel lost something is being reborn, a collectivity we thought extinct…and it will probably be our salvation…

 

 

7 tricolor Cyanotype Collage

Being constantly on alert isn’t good for anyone, but when it’s an action born in childhood it’s difficult to change… in these times it’s even more difficult. But sometimes you have to stop standing at attention, breathe and observe the present for what it is. Let’s start breathing…

 

 

9 Single-color cyanotypes Carbonated and toned with madder root, coffee, and green tea, 21x15x3 cm, collage, unique piece.
Working on shadows, I realize that identity can take on a thousand different forms, like a quick-change artist who changes clothes for the occasion. Perhaps the core is always the same, or perhaps not, but the surface is shaped and dressed differently depending on the occasion. I always work fluidly in my art, and in this case, the process has brought me something more graphic, even though I always start from photography.

 

 

What remains after the image fades.
A trace, a surface, a presence that insists.

Trichromatic cyanotype
Unique piece
20 × 29 × 3 cm