Artworks by Federica Belloli

Imagination is not an escape, but the place where the invisible takes form. This is the space in which my painting is rooted. I am a figurative painter, and I work with the human figure as a threshold between the visible and the inner world. My early formative years in the atelier of the painter Rodolfo Guzzoni played a decisive role in directing my research toward portraiture, understood not as mere representation, but as a space in which inner states, memories, and emotional thresholds can emerge.

My work unfolds in a territory where realism coexists with a poetic and visionary dimension. I am interested in the gaze of childhood, not as a narrative subject, but as a perceptual quality: a space of purity, wonder, and imagination. My figures often appear in communion with their spirit animal, a symbolic presence referring to our instinctive, natural, and mysterious dimension — to what precedes us and moves through us.

Portraits thus become liminal surfaces: places where fragility, melancholy, and solitude surface, but also silence and suspension. Identity is never asserted; rather, it slowly dissolves into matter.

I favour acrylics for their immediacy and matte quality, which allow me to work through glazes and stratifications without light interfering with the perception of the image. After an early phase focused on black and white, almost whispered, I began to introduce colour sparingly, in broad, rarefied areas, to construct unreal, suspended atmospheres, in tension with the concreteness of the figurative subject.

Experimentation is an essential part of my process. New materials, hybrid techniques, and contrasts between different surfaces and densities become tools to constantly question and expand my language. I conceive painting as a transforming organism, a field of research evolving together with perception.

My works are held in private collections across Europe, America, Australia, and Asia.
I live and work in Milan.
I am represented by ONART Gallery, Florence.