Roberto Cafarotti - Pensieri Sommersi

“Pensieri Sommersi”, oil on canvas, cm 75 × 55 cm

In this painting I wanted to explore the fracture between what we show of ourselves and what remains submerged in our consciousness. The female figure immersed in water represents deep thought, that which lives beneath the surface, while the woman in a white shirt, standing above her, observes with detachment and melancholy the external world. Down below, the nude man lying on the floor is the vulnerable flesh, the body that reflects and suffers, abandoned among everyday objects: a guitar, an open book, fragments of shapes.
I built the image with a contemporary Mannerist language: elegant and elongated lines, artificial poses, cool and pearly colors that contrast with the warm tones of the skin. It’s not surrealism, but an intellectual and stylized construction of inner reality. The figures do not look at each other, yet they are deeply connected in a silence charged with tension.
With Pensieri Sommersi I sought to give visible form to the solitude of thought, to the unsettling beauty of introspection, and to the difficulty of bringing to light what lives beneath the surface of our existence.