© 2025 Antonella Ippolito
pastelli a olio
Artist's Statement
To portrait my themes, my staple medium are oil pastels and oil sticks, but I often work combining both techniques. Not only offer this techniques bold, vibrant colors, but also a smooth consistency allowing to produce a painterly effect with very subtle nuances in addition to strong contrasts. I love the unique texture of this medium, since painting is for me , all about color combinations and shading as a real language to convey emotion.
My paintings are created in large part from a close observation of landscapes and try to redefine the special qualities of places, as well as the suggestions that arise from them. I am accompanied by a love of detail as well as an interest in exploring the tension between the foreground and the depth of the pictorial space. Many of my works depict landscapes from the Mediterranean or Northern Europe that 'belong' to me because I have experienced and loved them at different times, in different ways, and in relation to different situations. In this respect, space is reflected not only as a physical place, but also, quasi, as a space for thinking, reflecting, and questioning.
In recent times, my work has expanded thematically and moved away from the pure landscape staging. Numerous paintings relate to issues that concern me on a personal level of reflection, such as women's experience and the social conventions associated with it; others elaborate on symbolic motifs. These may well have an underlying attribution of meaning: Once they have been transferred to paper, however, I understand them as mere carriers of impulses in Lyotard's sense, implying a multiplicity of meanings beyond their narrative and/or mimetic value, and which can be interpreted differently depending on the particular gaze that is looking at them. The recipient is thus to be included in the interpretation as the giver of meaning.