Paolo Ferluga - L'aggredito e l'aggressore

I am Paolo Ferluga, an Italian artist born in Trieste in 1967, living and working in Trieste. After attending the first year of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, I graduated in architecture in 1994. I soon left the architecture profession to devote myself entirely to painting. Until 2024 I painted mainly urban landscapes that in 2003 allowed me to participate as the representative of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region in the exhibition Vernice — Paths of Young Italian Painting. Subsequently I worked on large formats on canvases with a geopolitical character, within which the gaze extended from that of the real image to the global gaze upon the world. In recent years my painting has taken on a more intimate character; having abandoned landscape painting I discovered the power of color and of the gesture, playing on the boundary between figuration and abstraction. Alongside this new way of working in painting, my passion for sculpture emerged, expressing myself particularly in the modeling of clay. After firing the clay I intervene coolly with acrylic paint and enamel. My sculptures, even when anthropomorphic in character, are never faithful casts of the human figure, but instead include parts of fantastical animals that bring the observer back to a primordial dimension.

The sculpture “the assaulted and the aggressor” shows two subjects with different morphological characteristics colliding violently even though they stand on the same legs. The reference to the mantra incessantly recited by the media on the responsibilities of the Russo-Ukrainian war is clear.