My watercolors portray the light filtering through the trees, making its way between branches and leaves. It is a fleeting moment, full of intensity; it is the beating heart of all my work. In particular, I paint the Black Pine, defined as a “pioneer plant” because it adapts even to shallow soils poor in nutrients. These plants transform the land, making it more suitable for other, more demanding species that will settle there later. The ecological importance of these species is therefore remarkable. The Black Pine contributed to the reforestation of the “Karst Heath,” a stony desert that once stretched across Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia.
I listen and observe the beauty and the restlessness of space as it expands, it splits between sky and earth in a dreamlike yet violent atmosphere when the air becomes rarefied in the heat of the burning forest. The fire of 2022 erased the borders between Italy and Slovenia, devastating forests mostly of Black Pines, reducing them to charred ghosts and revealing a soil marked by depressions reminiscent of the First World War; uncovering a painful past for the inhabitants and also for me, who lives in this land.