My work emerges from a specific territory: the volcanic corridor between Vesuvius and the Campi Flegrei, where the earth has repeatedly asserted its primacy over civilization, burying and preserving in equal measure, collapsing and regenerating in cycles that predate and outlast any human order.

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What Pompeii teaches is not catastrophe. It is the blindness that precedes it: the fact that ash was already falling while the city lived, traded, built. No one recognized it as ash.

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I do not treat Pompeii or Oplontis as ruins. I treat them as active propositions: evidence that beauty and destruction are not opposites, but conditions of the same process.

 

The abrupt cessation imposed by lava produced, paradoxically, these cities' most enduring form. This logic, that preservation requires burial, that what we see is always a fragment of what was, structures the way I build a painting.

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On the canvas, chromatic strata accumulate and dissolve. Flat fields of color are laid down and partially effaced; geometric structures emerge and are subsumed; gestural marks sediment into surfaces that carry simultaneously the memory of Roman fresco and the pressure of volcanic deposit.

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Matter does not illustrate: it acts. Chromatic choices, gesture and stratification do not represent lived experience, they activate it, bringing to the surface traumas and memories with the same logic by which lava restores what it first submerged.

 

Each layer holds traces of what preceded it while resisting full legibility. The cracks that cross the surface are not signs of deterioration: they are the visible signature of time, what confers permanence to what would otherwise be lost.

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My aim is not to reconstruct the past, but to make its pressure on the present visible: to paint not what was, but what was never fully lost.