Building identities

Is identity immutable? The person we are today is the same as six years ago, ten years ago? When and why did we change? The painting stems from a reflection on the relationship between the concepts of Identity and Time. We swimmers often identify ourselves and teammates by the color scheme of our materials. In the water, all wearing identical caps and goggles, in the midst of movement and noise, one can recognize each other above all for the swimming suit that assumes the role of temporary chromatic identity. Every swimmer has a story that can also be reconstructed through that second skin that is the swimming suit; often it’s particularly difficult to separate from it, even when the fabric is worn down by use and it’s useless, because of this mix of identity and memories that characterizes it. In Building identities I both pictorially represented a swimming suit that marked my competitive experience, and chose to really insert it in the artwork by applying some of its parts on the canvas. Like a curtain that recalls the drapery of the classical pictorial tradition, the swimming suit leaves space for a full-scale self-portrait that will wear a part of it forever: I can no longer find the myself who swam with those colors as she was, but she was a fundamental ‘piece’ for the construction of the person I am now, and for this reason I wanted to fix on the canvas the essence that remains of her, an echo of the past that has been carried up to today changing imperceptibly but constantly in the mysterious and fascinating passage of time.