Francesco Vaglica (Rome,1965) has been active as a painter in Italy's capital city for over three decades. A prominent figure in solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, he teaches Life Drawing and Painting at Rome's School of Ornamental Arts. Vaglica has chosen painting as the living medium through which to forge and bring to light his sense of existing exactly halfway between form and colour, nature and painting, in an intimate and urgent process of exploration.

In his paintings, forms emerge from material chaos. The dialogue between the artwork and the viewer is established by means of a language made of brushstrokes, pictorial matter and gestures.

From abstraction, forms gradually mould into human figures, often inspired by myth. Through brushstrokes, chaos transforms into compositional order and becomes an emotional space in which the subject can dwell. Myth, far from being merely a scholarly reference, becomes a poetic tool to interpret the contemporary world.

The resulting paintings navigate between forms and shifting chromatic atmospheres that tend towards the immaterial  (lines, freed from materiality, outline the figures’ contours and intertwine in space) and towards abstraction, especially in his most recent works in oil and charcoal.

Irene Fornari (Rome, 1988) began her pictorial training in the Life Drawing and Painting Course at Rome's School of Ornamental Arts, before developing her artistic practice in Francesco Vaglica’s art studio.

In her paintings reality takes shape through a full-bodied, layered brushstroke, through which objects and figures assert their existence on the canvas's field displaying their strong presence—at times massive and solemn, at times suspended and silent. The joy of painting and drawing stems from an almost physical relationship with the pictorial surface; tracing lines and progressively applying colours or charcoal help figures emerge from initial patterns and gradually define themselves more vividly.

Her images, rather than illustrating a scene, seem to pose questions about the mystery of their own very existence on the pictorial surface and in the painter's inner world.

These are rooted in personal experience, memories, and spontaneous visions that become entangled in her consciousness and demand to be materialized in the medium of paint.