I think in diagrams. I build visual languages and systems of marks and symbols to study what it is to be human: the self, our relationships, the stories we carry, the wounds we are trying to heal — but also the lighter quirks that makes us who we uniquely are.
I work at close range, at the scale of a single person and the people around them. I believe that the larger, collective problems we face can only be approached once we fully understand ourselves inside, and therefore one another as human beings, so that is where I begin.
Each piece starts from a question I am living with. I gather what I am reading, listening to, and learning about it, and translate that material into a diagram. The translation is the thinking. What I cannot yet hold in language I can lay down on paper and keep looking at.
I began this studio practice in 2025, working on paper and canvas. It runs alongside my design practice.
I call them Modelli Circolari, and they stem from my obsession with the things I am eager to understand or fascinated by. Each piece has an inner focus circle that hosts symbols, connections, diagrams and words.
01 · redhumans, consciousness and technology, stemming from earlier studies on intelligent machines
02 · bluethe hidden structure of personal identity and its evolution
03 · goldgraphic scores from the Fluxus movement; visual notations to convey musical structure
04 · pinkthe subtle body, as described in ashtanga yoga
05 · yellowmy own Mysore ashtanga practice — the primary series, as it was taught to me by the wonderful teachers at @theshalanyc
06 · greenchoreography, from one of my last contemporary dance performances when I used to dance in Italy
07 + 08 · splitthe dynamics and anatomy of a romantic relationship
09 · light redthe world of Internal Family Systems
A new series I've just begun. Where the Modelli Circolari hold a subject inside one contained circle, here the structure loosens and spreads. The logical diagram of something overlaps the more impulsive, emotional side of it underneath. This time, spatially, I use the idea of fractures and margins in the paper and in the color to discover these.
01a path to getting past the self's protective parts, to be able to reach the more vulnerable ones that have been kept safe.
02"essere umano": being human and human being. Solitude and loneliness. Repetition that anesthetizes.
03the fractures, margins, misaligned moments to be climbed over.
04the stories we keep running in our minds, unpacking them so they can't hold us back anymore.
05here and now, and the many timelines that are ahead of us. Finding a higher level of coherence.
06how do we make sense of something as complex and ungraspable as memory? This is a map of it.
Sewing patterns are among the most intimate technical drawings that exist — a system built to fit one specific body, to account for its particular measurements and proportions. These pieces borrow that language: graph paper, construction arcs, notch marks, seam allowances. The annotations circle questions about modeling itself — what it means to take a measurement, to reduce something living to a set of parameters, to ask whether the model will hold.
Discombobulated maps of my studio taken apart, with the objects and plants wandering around and chasing each other. Some lines dive into their own color, and some get tired of it and put on a different one halfway. Games of lights flatten up on the canvas.
The most openly ironic series — small, quick, made on purpose with humble, almost throwaway materials. They belong to an Italian lineage of the playful conceptual object, where something modest is asked to carry a serious thought; the idea matters more than the making.
Everyday materials given philosophical problems through image and Italian text. A bundle of brushes, a tangle of thread, a row of matchsticks — each piece pairs its object with a handwritten aphorism. The objects don't illustrate the words. They think alongside them.
Writing that can be kept without being read. The hand moves through the full motions of journaling, forming letters, following lines and releasing what is underneath, but the script is stripped just far enough from legibility that not even I can read it a few minutes later.
The illegibility is built in from the start: a way of having the page without the exposure. The body does the work of letting go, and what remains is the visual trace of that. Some are almost graphic, studying how text sits on a surface and what different formats carry implicitly: the letter, the list, the timeline. Others are purely gestural, the handwriting loosening into something closer to weather than language.
Structures layered over structures, each made in a different logic and technique resembling notations, connections and relationships.
Gestural ink paintings annotated with the actual timestamps of each stroke — when it was made, in sequence. The act of painting becomes the data being recorded. What's usually invisible in a finished piece — the rhythm, the pauses, the duration — is written into the surface.
Watercolor botanicals layered over white patterns that suggest root systems, sound waves, growth rhythms. The white marks function as a kind of alphabet, whether it's our language imposed on the plants or their own communication system that we can't quite decipher. These paintings ask what's happening beneath what we can see and what forces and patterns exist beyond our usual ways of knowing.
A journal where I finish paint left on my palette and test colors from other pieces. An accidental archive of what happens in the studio between the intentional pieces.