Portrait nominee

I’m a photographer, but I also use another medium, painting: I take photos, I print them, I paint on them and I photograph them again.
Photography is powerful, it can stop time and freeze a moment forever, but it can be much more. It’s a window into our perceivable world and also into the other world, the personal one. There are 7.5 billion ways to see another human being and I want my work to make us consider the parallels and the difference between what we see and what we perceive.
We all have hundreds of different personalities, thousands of different feelings always evolving. Everyone is a different person when at work, when with the family, with friends or alone. There is always more than you can see. It’s something that lies beneath the surfaces screaming to emerge and with the paint I try to bring to light those feelings and desires, fears and emotions that often we keep hidden from the rest of the world and sometimes we hide from ourselves too.

I spent most of my life shooting and painting. When I finally realized that I need both, and they don’t need to be separate works, it set me free.
I’m not interest in creating fantasy, abstract worlds, and I’m not interested in appearances and descriptions either, but what I need to make sense to, is the world around me and all its people. Both the environment and every living being in it are constantly changing and their most significant traits are invisible to the eye. So, I asked myself how could I use photography to talk about something invisible?
Paint is a wonderful medium that opens you to infinite possibilities, but this versatility was a limit to me as I need that deep connection to the world around me that photography brings.
Photography is deeply linked to what we see, to the physical reality. Many scholars have discussed this topic at length, much better than I could ever do. It may be ‘the death of reality’, a ‘hyperreality’ or a ‘minute part of reality’, in any case its profound connection to the world that physically exists it’s undeniable.
But when emotions are involved, and we look at reality as something