Who: Daniela Monza
What: Acrylics on MDF board/canvas
A painting, like our personal identity, is composed by a series of layers that interact and influence one another.
At the bottom lies the unconscious mind, the fundamental layer of our true self. It is the realm of the instincts, where our spontaneous thoughts and feelings create the dynamics of life itself. Everything is moving, energetically, in every direction.
At the bottom of a painting is the ground, the initial blocking in and the textures; they will affect every other layer that is painted on top. They constitute the fundamentals of what the painting will look like at the end.
On the external surface of our identity, our rational mind selects and edits what is beneath and it lets emerge only what its filters deem appropriate of expression, while suppressing everything else. It is the realm of social conventions, habits and expectations.
In the same way, the final layers of paint applied can both obscure and modify what is underneath them, filter what is visible and what remains concealed. What a viewer experiences in front of a painting is a selection of all the material produced during the painting process. Most of it remains concealed in between the lower layers. Yet, it still has a deep influence on what is seen on the top of the painted surface.
This body of work is directly developed from an art therapy practice the artist initially conceived as a support for the psychological treatment she needed in 2016 to overcome depression and other emotional difficulties she was facing. The use of spontaneous drawing and art making was necessary to bypass an emotionally blocked long term memory that allowed no memories of the past surface spontaneously. With this non-rational channel to trigger them and express them visually at the same time, long lost memories could be accessed and the therapy could work
These works are an investigation about how personal identity is constructed by the individual, but also explore concepts of depth and appearance. An experimental use of the medium of painting, more specifically acrylic painting with its own specificities, with attention to the formal characteristics of paint (texture, transparency, sheen, etc.) has been used to convey the fundamental process of identity building within the individual.
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