I was born in Rome in 1967 and I am a self-taught artist. My painting does not come from an academic path but from an inner urgency I have never felt the need to justify. My encounter with the ensō was an episode as accidental as it was decisive. One sultry afternoon, in an unusually scorching London, while I was waiting to speak with a colleague in a small dental office, I found myself facing a canvas depicting three open concentric circles. I didn’t know what they meant, yet they struck me with the force of an image destined to stay.
From that moment on, the incomplete circle imprinted itself in my memory like an obsession. For months, I kept seeing it in my mind until, back in Rome, on another summer afternoon, I felt the urgency to reproduce it. I built a stretcher, laid out the paint, and with three distinct strokes of the spatula let that image take form. Only later did I discover that what I was painting was an ensō, a symbol of fullness and emptiness, of beginning and end, of instant and continuity.
My research is profoundly instinctive. I have never studied Japanese culture systematically, but I have breathed it, touched it, perceived it. My approach is not intellectual—it is visceral. I have always worked this way, letting material and gesture transform into a personal language.
When I paint, acrylic becomes a living fluid. I pour it onto the canvas, spread it with broad spatulas, make it explode in splashes and marks that, somehow, always return to evoke the circle. In the works I dedicate to the five senses—Sight, Hearing, Touch, Taste, and Without Senses—color becomes a sensory experience: a substance to see, to touch, to imagine as sound or flavor. Each canvas is an attempt to capture a different vibration, a different state of consciousness.
There is a constant tension between instinct and restraint, between the power of a mark that wants to say everything and the silence of a void that demands no explanation. Some works are born from raw energy—red, yellow, and black chasing and repelling each other—others from the calm of a controlled, almost meditative gesture. But always, deep down, I return to that place: to the incomplete circle, to its promise of wholeness and its acceptance of imperfection.
My ensō is neither an exercise in style nor a philological homage. It is an encounter that found me by chance and has never left me since. Each work is a way to let myself be found again, to reconcile with that moment when the image appeared and told me—without words—that it was mine.
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