My story

Maria Pagano’s works are the result of a long and multifaceted personal artistic experience. She has been painting continuously since childhood. Her strong emotions, countless passions, great curiosity, and deep desire for exploration inspire these works. They are paintings rich in the colors of nature, the golden energy of the sun, and are full of endless variations, born not only from her mastery of color but also from the rhythms and notes of music. Maria observes nature and magnifies it, as if through a microscope: a flat shade like the gray of a beach magically breaks down into colorful and sparkling grains of sand. A green meadow fragments into a myriad of shades. This is the secret that makes her works come alive: to truly appreciate them, you need to look closely, very closely. This is how Maria Pagano’s paintings are born! They are magnified portions of nature, so enlarged that we lose touch with reality, abstracted to the point of dematerialization, yet still retaining life, the warmth of the sun, and light. They are informal to the point of having no fixed meaning; they can be displayed in any position, rotated or inverted. They are free from constraints, leaving the viewer with creative possibilities. You can play with the effects of light that these paintings can and must generate, thanks to the extensive use of pure gold. The technique? If you observe closely, you will notice a careful and in-depth research. The artist covers her canvases with layers of oil paints, tempera, acrylics, pure gold, chalks, applied with spatulas, brushes, and unfamiliar tools, then scratches them, rediscovering the underlying layers, and continues to work over them, resulting in alternating brightness, textures, and shades. It’s incredible to think that these almost violent gestures are generators of inner calm for the artist, who, in fact, titles her works with sweet and reflective names, speaking of love, of stopping time, of the most beautiful moments, and of the perfect moment. It’s as if this creative gesture, so aggressive and tormented, has metabolized the tensions, depression, and cruelties of the world, finally stabilizing the artist in a regained quiet calm. This calm is infused in the layers of these works, a positivity that transmits to the viewer’s benefit. Look for the ‘happiness that blows in the wind’, ‘declared love’, ‘ancient secrets’, and ‘no time to die’ in these paintings… Behind each piece lies a struggle and a laborious process that we cannot see, but we sense that there is a ‘before’, a journey that led to the result, a path marked by deep furrows. This is the secret!