Roberto Cafarotti - Mea Culpa

Roberto Cafarotti recently won the Fabrizio De André Prize in the painting section, in its twenty-fifth edition.

Mea Culpa
Oil on canvas, 50 × 35 cm, 2026
Roberto Cafarotti

A woman with an impassive, slightly irked face, wrapped in a long red-brown dress, arms crossed on her chest in a gesture of closure and judgment.

On the left, projected onto the green wall, her black, wide shadow seems to live a life of its own: the bowed profile, the hand brought to the chest, the body bent in a posture of confession. It is she, the shadow, whispering the “mea culpa,” while the real woman remains standing, still and almost accusatory.

Around them the room breathes with solitude and memories: a small round table with a bottle of wine and a glass, a empty cup, a bird with blue and yellow wings that seems suspended in mid-air, mirrors and frames that multiply images, plants, drapes, and a ceiling populated by floating shapes. All contribute to creating an inner theater where guilt and resentment dialogue without the need for words.

An intensely psychologically charged work, in which light and shadow are not merely formal elements, but the true protagonists of a silent confession.