Petrucci works from her studio in Pistoia, in Tuscany, a territory at the centre of both her life and her art. That place is what makes her painting possible. It is the time that allows her to pause before responding, to listen before showing herself, and that gesture of pause is what appears frozen in every canvas.
The path to painting was not direct. Desirée has drawn since childhood, studied Fashion Design at Polimoda, in Florence, and worked for more than a decade as an apparel designer, specialising in sportswear. “the corporate world never truly felt like home”, she admits, and describes the dissatisfaction of a creativity bound by the rules of production and the market. It was during the pandemic that she decided to share her work for the first time, overcoming years of shyness.
She initially worked digitally, focused on print techniques, a legacy still recognisable in the almost graphic construction of her figures. The decisive turn came later, when she began painting on canvas with acrylics, structural paste and oil pastels. The physical contact with the material was not a change of technique, but of method of thought: her figures, she says, “emerge directly from this physical touch, embodying intimate emotional states”.
From this also comes the deliberate rawness of her formal language. Desirée paints emotion without softening it, almost in its primitive state, because for her feelings are at once complex and elemental. There is no narrative to explain, nor anecdote to illustrate, there is a posture, a gesture of the hands, a mass of colour that serves as hair and emotional weight at the same time. The structure of the body is, in her painting, the structure of feeling.
This way of working also responds to a reading of the present. Desirée speaks of the constant pressure imposed today by the gaze of others, “we live attentive to how others perceive us and to how we try to control the image we present”. Faced with that demand, her painting chooses the opposite: to pause, to take a step back, and to seek beneath the surface the genuine emotion that haste and constant exposure tend to hide. Her figures do not pose to be seen; they hold themselves, with their broad shoulders and firm hands, in the instant just before deciding how much of themselves they will show.