Eliana Marinari’s practice is based on a long tradition of drawing. Reinterpreting the genres of the landscape and the portrait as a means to challenge our perception of reality, her work reflects a fascination for the power of images and explores the human capacity to refer to a visual object and generate semantic associations.
Trained in classical drawing in Florence, Eliana brings to light subjects taken from reality by obscuring them, questioning in this way the power of representation.
Eliana looks to bring the visitor into a dialogue with her recomposed faces, curious about what types of memory they call to mind, what relationships they evoke, in the visitor’s quest for familiarity. The very detailed technique she has developed involves numerous stages. She begins with ink and pastel drawing. Next, she sprays on acrylic colors as a “glaze”, which shrouds the initial drawing like a Renaissance-style sfumato. The point of departure vanishes amidst the transformation, generating a detaching effect that unsettles the gaze. “The deconstructed image imitates our mind’s process of creating a visual representation and brings time, memory, loss, and an emotional narrative to the subject,” she specifies.
Italian, b. 1983
