ANASSIMANDRA

Anassimandra is an ongoing artistic inquiry into the conditions through which form comes into being. Rather than pursuing a fixed visual language, the work returns to the same fundamental question through changing materials, processes and spatial relationships.

The forms occupy an unstable threshold between the record of a thing and the thing itself. They are encountered as material presences while appearing to belong to a language that cannot be fully read. They may evoke organisms, fragments, vessels, tools, architectures or pictograms, yet resist settling into a fixed identity or meaning.

Each body of work establishes different conditions through which form may emerge, transform or dissolve. The work does not represent this process from the outside: emergence is embedded in the act of making itself, where intention, matter, chance and response participate in what comes into being.

ANASSIMANDRA: FORMATION AND DISSOLUTION, 2026

Formation and Dissolution explores the unstable threshold at which something becomes perceptible as form, and the moment in which that form begins to lose its boundaries. Across sculpture, painting, paper, found material and installation, forms emerge, gather, fragment and dissolve without settling into fixed identities. A face appears through a stain and simultaneously disappears; clay suggests body, vessel, organism or fragment without becoming any one of them; text and image are transformed back into matter. Installed in relation to one another and to the architecture, the works are not conceived as autonomous objects but as temporary states within a larger field. Space, distance and the movement of the viewer continually reorganize these relationships. Formation and dissolution are therefore not opposites, but interconnected conditions of becoming: what takes form already contains the possibility of its transformation, and what dissolves becomes the condition from which something else may emerge.

Images are from my studio process. The exhibition will be presented in October 2026 at The Open Studio Firenze.

ANASSIMANDRA: BETWEEN SENSATION AND LANGUAGE, 2027

For a long time, my investigation through painting has concerned how sensation begins to approach language—not language as a system of fixed signs, but as the moment before meaning becomes stable.

Colour, line, density, transparency and empty space appear as distinct events. They approach one another, collide, interrupt one another or remain separate without being forced into pictorial agreement. Forms occupy an unstable threshold between material presence and sign: they may evoke organisms, fragments, objects or pictograms, yet resist becoming completely identifiable or readableThe exhibition brings together two different conditions of painting. In the large works on canvas, painted events expand to bodily scale. A stain, line or concentration of colour is no longer encountered simply as a mark within an image; it acquires weight, distance and an almost sculptural presence. The canvas becomes a field in which forms confront the viewer physically while remaining suspended between sensation and meaning.

The smaller works on paper form a heterogeneous installation. Made on papers of different dimensions, tones, textures and material qualities, they are not preparatory images or reduced versions of the large paintings. Each is an autonomous instance of investigation—a record of a particular encounter between gesture, matter, chance and response. Distributed through space, they also become fragments within a wider constellation whose relationships remain provisional.

The two scales do not establish a hierarchy. The large canvases concentrate the encounter; the smaller works disperse it. One gives the painted event bodily and architectural presence, while the other allows meanings and relationships to multiply across an installation.

Neither canvas nor paper functions as a neutral support. The tension and physical extension of canvas affect the reach of the body and the scale of the gesture. The tone, absorbency, fragility, and resistance of paper participate differently in what appears. In both, empty areas are active intervals—spaces in which forms remain unresolved and available to new relations.

This principle extends into the architecture of the exhibition. The large paintings require distance and confront the body as singular presences. The smaller works activate walls, passages and thresholds through accumulation, separation and rhythm. The viewer moves between concentrated encounters and dispersed fragments; no single work contains the whole. The exhibition takes form through the shifting relationships perceived between one work and another, and between each work, the space and the moving body.

Anassimandra: Between Sensation and Language explores the threshold at which sensation begins to articulate itself while remaining open—before it can be completely named, organised or understood.

Work is progress…