The Shape of Feeling

A project by Alba Bertagnolli Hemingway

This exhibition, like my entire practice as a painter, stems from a reflection on the body, understood not as an image to be represented but as a site of experience, a path to knowledge. It is an inquiry deeply shaped by more than thirty-five years of studying the body, first through yoga and later through Tantric thought, which sees the body as an instrument of awareness and transformation.

Through the body we encounter the world, recognise the other, and experience desire, closeness, loss and joy. Even before thought, it is the body that holds the deepest language and expresses the most complex forms of feeling.

The works gathered in The Shape of Feeling do not seek to define the figure. Bodies surface from the paint and, at the same time, seem to dissolve, remaining suspended between mark and stain, in the interval between luminescence and breath. The face, the gesture and the embrace are central images, open to the experience of the viewer.

Every painting in the exhibition bears the title Emozione residua (Residual Emotion), followed by a progressive number. These are not works devoted to different emotions, but variations on a single inquiry: what remains when memory loses its outlines and only the intensity of lived experience endures. As in memory, so in painting, form can become veiled without feeling fading away: it is precisely what is not fully shown that reveals its presence most powerfully.

An unexpected element often surfaces in the making of an image: a colour that breaks the balance, a form that strays from the rhythm of the whole. Not a random dissonance but a necessary choice: seeking harmony and balance while welcoming the unforeseen, driven by the need to travel along tracks I have laid myself, while always claiming the freedom to derail.

The images I paint ask to be moved through. They invite the viewer to pause in a space where the visible does not exhaust meaning, but opens onto mystery as another dimension of being. Every authentic experience conceals a part that escapes definition, living on in form as a silent residual emotion.