Abstract

Wild Thing (2026) marks a turning point in my practice as I step away from my roots in expressionist realism and move entirely into abstraction. As part of a new body of work developed in 2026, this piece reflects a very personal shift in how I approach the canvas—letting go of recognizable subjects to see where pure form and color take me. Living and working in Milan as a contemporary artist, my surroundings continually influence how I think about structure, urban energy, and psychological space.

With this piece, the aim was to capture the tension of breaking free from safe, familiar boundaries. Working abstractly requires a different kind of bravery; you have to trust your intuition entirely. The composition became a map of that internal transition, built up in layers that feel almost geological, echoing the complex shifts we experience personally when we decide to reinvent our path.

Materially, the work is oil on canvas using both brush and a palette knife technique. I used brushes to lay down fluid underlayers and sweeping soft movements, while the palette knife allowed me to apply thick impasto strokes that scrape, carve, and obscure what lies beneath. In doing this, I drew a lot of inspiration from Gerhard Richter's approach to layering, where history is built up and partially erased all at once. Letting those earlier, brush-worked colors appear through the heavy knife strokes gives the surface a true sense of depth and archaeological time.

The heavy texture gives the abstract forms real physical weight, anchoring all that raw, chaotic energy into something tangible and enduring. Wild Thing invites to lose themselves in that dense terrain of pigment, offering a quiet meditation on personal evolution, freedom, and the sheer power of abstraction.