Stefania Ormas - Naturaleza viva

This canvas is part of my Naturaleza series, and I named it Naturaleza Viva. There’s a little wordplay behind this title: I’ve always found the traditional still lifes a bit sad, so I wanted to create something that celebrates life, spontaneous growth, the hidden connection we have with the natural world.

I chose this long, vertical format because it gave me the sense of an open window onto a suspended moment, almost a dream. The whole painting is made exclusively in acrylic. I really enjoy working with this medium because it allows me to create, on one hand, that dark, opaque, almost velvety background that, for me, represents mystery, the silence of night; on the other, it gives me the precision needed for the smallest details. If you look at the figure at the bottom, there is a part of me in her, in her fragilities. She has very fair skin, which I blended for a long time with acrylic to make her seem to emerge from the darkness, as if touched by a moonbeam. The gestures of her hands are very spontaneous yet protective: that hand on the face and the other on the neck tell of a moment of shyness, of inner listening. In her eyes I tried to paint a sweet, romantic melancholy, a look that seeks eye contact but without being intrusive.

And then there’s the ivy. I love ivy because it climbs, it seeks light, it protects the walls it grows on. Here I painted it as if it were delicately wrapping the girl, creating a crown of leaves that descend from the darkness toward her.

Stefania Ormas, Italian painter, graduated in painting from the International Art School in Terni; in recent years she has exhibited in several solo and group shows both in Italy and abroad, such as Casa de la Cultura de Navacerrada – Madrid, Palazzo del Infantado in Guadalajara, Museo Reina Sofía – Madrid, RED03 gallery in Barcelona, Galeria Bernet in Barcelona, Roccartgallery in Florence. Her works are in private collections in Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, America, and publicly, for example in the municipality of Gata de Gorgos in Spain.

The world she represents is predominantly feminine and she does so with a careful and realistic eye, always capturing a poetic vein. Her style is a compendium of the most recent painting forms, maintaining a close adherence to figurativism with attention to the anthropology of the subject.