For Rome Art Week, Amandine De Mascarel opens her San Lorenzo studio to the public, presenting recent paintings alongside earlier works, works in progress and traces of the painting process.

At 4pm, the open studio will include Painting and Authority: Does a Painting Need to Earn Its Right to Exist?, an illustrated talk and conversation exploring how paintings acquire value, legitimacy and authority.

We are accustomed to judging paintings through recognised signs of authority: skill, composition, colour, gesture, originality, resolution and technical mastery. These qualities do more than shape our judgement of whether a painting is good; they can also function as forms of justification, signalling that a painting knows what it is doing and has earned our attention.

De Mascarel’s practice questions that requirement. Whether working with simple forms, repetitive gestures, painted words or restrained compositions, she asks whether a painting can be undeniable without conforming to established criteria of judgement, or displaying the expected signs of competence, sophistication or mastery.

The talk moves through questions of existence, value, legitimacy, justification and authority: who establishes the standards by which paintings are judged, when those standards become criteria for belonging, and whether something simple, repetitive, awkward, fragile or difficult to account for can still possess undeniable presence. These questions extend beyond aesthetics toward the ways authority itself is constructed and recognised.

Rather than arriving at a fixed conclusion, the conversation leaves its central proposition open: does a painting need to prove why it deserves to exist, or can it simply be undeniable?

Open Studio: Friday 23 October, 3–8pm
Talk: 4pm