Experimental Portraits (Tricolor & Toning Cyanotype)

Tri-color cyanotype layered over single-color cyanotypes toned with matcha tea, 15x21x3cm.
Today I’m starting again with a portrait, I felt like going back to digging inside myself… I’ve learned that following a straight line is not always the right way and perhaps bringing the darkest shadows into the light allows us to appreciate them better, after all we are always convinced that in duality black must succumb and die, but if we look a little further we realize that without shadow light would have no form, everything is part of everything.

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 over carbonated single-color cyanotypes and green tea and coffee turns,15x21x3cm. When mind and heart are connected there is no fear, fear is sometimes so great that it can be given its own name and the more time passes the more it grows, so we could perhaps treat it as a child and be authoritative instead of letting it decide as if it were a controlling and unloving parent! In theory it sounds simple enough but practice is quite another matter….
Would it perhaps serve to cuddle a little?

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.