Spark Art Fair 2022

“mars”, 190cm x 150cm, Oil on canvas, 2022

“midnight”, 190cm x 150cm, Oil on canvas, 2022

“early evening”, 116cm x 178cm, Oil on canvas, 2022

“dawn”, 90cm x 160cm, Oil on canvas, 2022

capricorn, 90m x 140cm, Oil on canvas, 2022

This new series of five paintings was conceived as a winter’s day without an end. As if the events of a month might reduce to a minute or span the length of a season. Time and focus billow and contract. From the melancholy of a cigarette smoked alone at night, through a stolen afternoon, into the unravelling warmth of a domestic dawn, and the expanses of the night sky, the chaotic red of a low hung mars orbit. The paintings titles direct us to a fluidity of days and nights, to a coolness punctuated with passion. Heat lies behind all desire. Midnight, mars, early evening, capricorn, dawn, the painting’s titles takeus from the bedroom to the stars and back.


Stefania’s painting practise exists on a border between reality and non reality. It is a constant mediation between knowledge learnt, and life lived. The material for her work is in a sense self generated from her positioning and investment in both pyshoanalysis and divergent social structures. This is to say that her research is one both experienced and applied. Subcultures for instance offer a place of possibility, they generate new narratives and demand authenticity, in the search for the ‘weird’ the ‘other’ and the ‘non real’ these outsider spaces offer possibilites for making the unreal real and for proliferating the occasional new mode of existance. We are confronted with a search for standout moments, and yet never do we face a postcard. Here we might consider the fantasy of Lacan - that fantasy that is the only true home for desire, indeed, the realisation of which will always render it undesirous. The paintings become semi autobiographical, semi autonomus situations, they are open to future possibilities and to a recontextualization from the past. Indeed the clarity and viscerality of her works shift focus, abstraction and figuration can be read directly as ideas forming elusively and ideas in chyrsalis.