Nel Pozzo 2017

Roberto Ferri painted this image, Nel Pozzo, seemingly without a date. He built up layers of luminous oil paint, its light and shade shifting and resolving into a figure kneeling in what looks like a darkened room. I find myself wondering what it might have been like for Ferri to build the figure out of almost nothing. To coax form and meaning from the paint, to see it emerge slowly under his brushstroke. There’s a quiet drama playing out here. She holds a broken vessel, from which a bird's wing extends. Is it a symbol of something lost or broken? What might she have been thinking as she holds it so close, a tear about to fall from her eye? Ferri’s classic figurative style reminds me of other artists like Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi. It is as though they are all in conversation across time and space. Painting is like that—one big, ongoing experiment and conversation in embodied expression. There are no fixed meanings, only possibilities!