The Isole9 collective, formed by Giuliana Paolucci and Luana Romano, presents a new stage in its artistic journey with the exhibition Square, a project born from a shared and layered reflection on a concept as simple as it is evocative. The title of the exhibition is not only a formal reference, but immediately becomes a semantic and symbolic node from which two fundamental interpretative trajectories branch out: on the one hand, square as a place of encounter, crossing, memory, and presence; on the other, square as a geometric shape, a figure of apparent stability, but dense with tensions and compositional possibilities. It is precisely from this dual direction—spatial and visual, conceptual and formal—that the artistic encounter between Giuliana Paolucci and Luana Romano takes shape. An encounter that does not renounce individual identities and poetics, but develops in a dialogical dimension, made possible and enhanced by the structure of the Isole9 collective. The works on display are therefore not simple juxtapositions, but moments of cross-reflection, spaces where the gaze of one is reflected and multiplied in that of the other.
Through different materials, techniques, and sensibilities, the two artists question the concept of the square as a place of relationship and form, as a field of tension between order and disorder, presence and emptiness, individual and collective.
Within this two-voice dialogue that constitutes the beating heart of the Isole9 collective, Giuliana Paolucci's research is articulated in evocative, vibrant painting, capable of transforming the space of the canvas into a meeting place. For Paolucci, the square is never just an architectural form, but an expanded concept, a mobile idea of sociality and relationship. In her works, any place can become a square: a theater, a seabed, a party, a shared moment. It is in these spaces—real or imagined—that her pictorial vision takes shape, made up of color, rhythm, and emotional resonances. Her painting develops like a visual score in which sound, music, and movement intertwine and translate into pictorial matter. Color is never static, but always in transformation, carrying an internal energy that generates dynamism. The shades and tones, skillfully superimposed or broken up, construct animated scenes of moments, as if the canvas could capture the beat of what has just happened or is about to happen. It is a language that moves between abstraction and figuration, where the boundary becomes fluid, opening up passages to the imagination and memory. In Giuliana's works, each painting is a visual narrative that is accomplished in color: stories made of presences, shadows, lights, and sound suggestions. The square, therefore, is also an emotional condition, a space where people and emotions meet, touch, and listen to each other. In this sense, her work becomes an invitation to slow down the gaze, to pause, to get involved in a painting that, rather than representing, interprets and evokes.
With this sensitive and layered approach, Giuliana Paolucci constructs open, welcoming places where individual experience intertwines with collective experience. Her idea of a square is a place where time is not linear, but condenses into fragments of memory, shared gestures, and chromatic vibrations that create—in the encounter—the very space of the work.If this is the path constructed by Giuliana Paolucci, made up of places that open up to relationships and the emotional movement of color, Luana Romano, on the other hand, interprets a language that is equally dense but different, closer to a form of structural reflection on the image and its narrative construction.
It all starts with her photographic archive: a living collection of shots that, rather than documenting, become a generative spark, the first visual impulse that opens up the creative process. For Luana, photography is never a point of arrival, but a sketch, a matrix that dissolves to make way for painting. Hers is a frenetic but accurate practice, in which the gesture retains an expressive urgency, but is also guided by visual rigor, by an inner need that demands consistency and depth.
Fundamental to her work is the process of subtraction: what is removed from the scene has the same weight as what remains. Every absence tells a story. This staging, reduced to the essential, is the result of a slow narrative journey, where every shape, light, or color is a bearer of meaning. Luana Romano works by variation: she explores the same theme in different ways and times through color, chiaroscuro, and matter. Her works take the form of true scenic architectures, where the pictorial space takes on the features of an essential, calibrated stage, in which each element is chosen and positioned with a precise dramaturgical intention.
If this is the path constructed by Giuliana Paolucci, made up of places that open up to relationships and the emotional movement of color, Luana Romano, on the other hand, interprets a language that is equally dense but different, closer to a form of structural reflection on the image and its narrative construction.
It all starts with her photographic archive: a living collection of shots that, rather than documenting, become a generative spark, the first visual impulse that opens up the creative process. For Luana, photography is never a point of arrival, but a sketch, a matrix that dissolves to make way for painting. Hers is a frenetic but accurate practice, in which the gesture retains an expressive urgency, but is also guided by visual rigor, by an inner need that demands consistency and depth.
Fundamental to her work is the process of subtraction: what is removed from the scene has the same weight as what remains. Every absence tells a story. This staging, reduced to the essential, is the result of a slow narrative journey, where every shape, light, or color is a bearer of meaning. Luana Romano works by variation: she explores the same theme in different ways and times through color, chiaroscuro, and matter. Her works take the form of true scenic architectures, where the pictorial space takes on the features of an essential, calibrated stage, in which each element is chosen and positioned with a precise dramaturgical intention. Just like in theater, what happens offstage is as important as what is shown. Emptiness is not absence, but a space for emotional resonance; light is not just illumination, but a voice that sculpts form and gives it meaning. From this perspective, Luana's painting becomes theatrical action, an act of visual direction where every detail is part of a complex, poetic, deeply sensitive dramaturgy. Transfigured scenes emerge from initial volumes, where splashes of color become stories, traces that speak beyond form. In this context, Square becomes a pretext for Luana Romano, a terrain on which to question rather than represent. The square, the delimited space, thus opens up to new possibilities of meaning, becoming the thread of a research that delves into the visible and the invisible. Her works possess an internal rhythm, a visual melody that vibrates beyond the painting itself. Painting becomes voice, and her goal seems to be total synaesthesia, in which every element contributes to constructing an immersive perceptual experience.The atmosphere that emerges is fundamental: you don't just look at a painting, but enter a space charged with emotional tension, silent but eloquent, where the viewer is invited to pause, seek meaning, and let themselves be transported.
In this intense and nuanced dialogue between Giuliana Paolucci and Luana Romano, Square is not just a title, but becomes a shared threshold, a common territory where their respective visions meet, touch, sometimes distance themselves, and then overlap again like two voices in counterpoint. It is a living space, in constant transformation, which does not seek to define but rather to welcome and host a plurality of languages, emotions, and times.
Like an island in the middle of a current, Square becomes a place where forms listen to each other, where colors respond like distant echoes, where the silences of a scene are reflected in the fluid gestures of a square. The works are not explained, but offered, like fragments of a polyphonic, open, never-ending story that asks the viewer to inhabit that space with an attentive and sensitive gaze.
Here, the square does not delimit, but contains and relaunches. It is a frame and a stage, a window and a threshold. It is a form that vibrates, that collects the beat of images, the rhythm of a memory that becomes present, the soft sound of color that transforms into voice. In this poetic intersection between two autonomous but deeply connected explorations, Square becomes a sensory experience, a visual melody, an invitation to lose oneself and find oneself again in the silent movement of art.
Dott. Roberto Sottile
Critico d'Arte
Direttore Polo Culturale Città di Rende (CS)
Direttore Artistico Centro Studi Arte – Bologna
