The Geography of Abundance
I was born in Gorizia in 1957, an Italian city that sat on the border between two worlds, divided by a wall that was a smaller, forgotten twin of the Berlin Wall. From the very beginning, my life was shaped by the experience of crossing boundaries. At three years old, I was taken to Brazil by family who would become my adoptive parents. What began as a temporary arrangement became a permanent gift: two families instead of one, two continents instead of one, two languages before I could even name what a language was. I grew up between Italy and Brazil, between one identity and another, between what I had been given and what I was becoming. Looking back, I understand that what could have been experienced only as loss became instead the first chapter of an extraordinary abundance. Every displacement brought new worlds. Every border crossed opened a horizon I would not otherwise have seen. That is the movement my art is made of.
From science to canvas
At CERN, where I worked from 1982, I lived among physicists searching for the invisible forces that hold matter together. There I learned something that changed how I see everything: reality has more than one truth. A particle does not have a single fixed state until it is observed. That principle, rooted in quantum physics, became the philosophical foundation of my art.
After CERN, I spent 27 years at the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, leading the digital communication for an institution that brought together colleagues from 187 countries. Decades immersed in the extraordinary complexity of human culture: proof, every day, that perspective changes everything. That the same reality can be read in a hundred different ways, each one valid, each one incomplete. At the end of 2019 I moved to Vienna and what had been a passion became a vocation.
Gallerists and artists encouraged me to pursue it fully. Six years later, I have developed my own artistic language and exhibited in cities across Europe and beyond. I did not become an artist despite my scientific career. I became this particular artist because of it. The rigour of CERN taught me to look beneath surfaces. The decades at the ILO taught me that beauty lives in the space between perspectives.
An alchemical dialogue
My practice is an act of material alchemy. I work with mixed media on canvas, resin on panel, and Bohemian crystal — combining the ancestral weight of earth powders, bitumen and metal dusts with the modern fluidity of acrylics and resins. Found objects. Recycled materials. Layers that should not belong together, and yet find harmony through transformation. This plurality of materials mirrors my own history. Just as my identity is a sediment of different cultures, languages and reinventions, my work is a sediment of materials that carry their own histories into the new form they create together.
Epoxy resin — which transitions from liquid to solid over 48 to 72 hours, allowing layers to interact in ways that cannot be fully predicted — has become a central material and a central metaphor. Working with resin means accepting what you cannot control. It means trusting the process. It means discovering that the most beautiful results are often the ones you did not plan. My influences range from the spatial sensitivity of Zao Wou-Ki and the emotional gravity of Mark Rothko to the gestural energy of Willem de Kooning and the tactile richness of Pierre Soulages. The Japanese concept of ma - space as breath, as the living pause between things - resonates deeply with how I understand the horizon line in my work. But the deepest influence is always the life itself. Lived across six decades, four countries, two professional careers, and one absolute conviction: that movement transforms.
The Vision
Today I live and work between Vienna and Barcelona. My practice spans painting, mixed-media works, three-dimensional installations, and large-scale commissions for private and institutional spaces. A life that began in a divided city has opened into something without walls, rich with experiences, cultures, friendships, and possibilities that I could not have imagined from the small apartment in Gorizia where it started. The fractures became crossings. The crossings became horizons. The horizons became the paintings. Each series I have created explores a different dimension of the same fundamental discovery: that movement transforms. That what we are given -however difficult, however unexpected - contains within it the seed of something more. That beauty is not despite the complexity of a life. It emerges because of it. In a world that increasingly prefers walls to bridges, my work offers a different kind of space: one where limits are points of departure, where materials that should not belong together find harmony, and where a horizon is always, always, an invitation.
“Each creation is a journey toward resonance: a blend of material depth and emotional clarity designed to vibrate within its environment. By embracing the unpredictability of matter and the heritage of a global journey, these works transform a space into a living celebration of transformation and light.”
— Antonella Quacchia