There are paintings that do not seek to please at first sight, but to hold the gaze of whoever looks at them. “My figures bear wide shoulders, commanding hands, and monumental hairstyles that transform into structural color forms: they are not mere decorative accents, but anchors carrying the weight of what we feel inside”, explains Desirée, and in that sentence lies the centre of all her work, the conviction that the body is the place where our feelings dwell.
Desirée works from her studio in Pistoia, in Tuscany, a territory at the centre of both her life and her art. “Being fortunate enough to live and create in Tuscany, surrounded by its quiet landscape, provides me with the slow pace and focus needed for this deep inner listening”, she says. 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 a clothing 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: “I had always been quite shy and hesitant about my art, but receiving immediate, positive responses from people gave me the courage and momentum to keep going”.
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. “That was when everything clicked, feeling the tangible surface under my hands changed my entire practice”, she affirms. 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”.
Desirée paints emotion without softening it
From this also comes the deliberate rawness of her formal language. Desirée paints emotion 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 both 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, “there is immense pressure today in how we are viewed by others, and in how we attempt to present ourselves to the world”. 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.
Desirée Petrucci
desi.petrucci@gmail.com
@desiree_petrucci
Project by Desirée Petrucci
