CARLOTTA MAZZARIOL

MAZZARIOL is interested in moments when something seems familiar yet escapes precise definition. Her paintings originate from multiple iconographic sources gathered in her personal photographic archive: spaces she has inhabited or remembers, images found online, and her own imagination. Rather than reproducing reality directly, she reconfigures these images into open, subjective compositions. The scenes remain recognizable, yet resist settling into a stable narrative, unfolding instead between familiarity and the unknown.

The works in Summer Breeze unfold across a series of private outdoor spaces, including gardens, lawns, courtyards, and terraces. Rather than functioning as landscapes in the conventional sense, these settings appear as extensions of everyday life. Echoing Intimism’s attention to domestic space and the quiet scenes of private life, MAZZARIOL carries this sense of intimacy into semi-open environments, exposing it to light, plants, and air. Meaning emerges at the edges: by the feet, beside the body, among the grass, drawing the viewer’s attention toward places that might otherwise go unnoticed. In these spaces, at once sheltered and open to the outside, the familiar begins to loosen, leaving room for chance to enter.

MAZZARIOL’s figures appear less as fully defined subjects than as states of mind or psychological traces. They often lower their heads, turn away, or remain partially obscured, caught in motion without resolving into clear portraits.

Between Feet and Sand focuses on the bent body of a figure whose face remain concealed, rendering an otherwise ordinary action strangely ambiguous. Is she picking something up, touching the cuff of her trousers, or drawn to some barely perceptible detail? The gesture itself is undramatic, yet its enlargement and close framing lend it a distinct psychological intensity. In this act of leaning closer, concentrating, and briefly withdrawing from the outside world, bodily posture becomes a state of mind.

Cats recur alongside the figures throughout this series of works, through which MAZZARIOL to capture the quiet intimacy of everyday companionship. They suggest closeness and affection while retaining an independence that resists complete domestication. In Seemed Far Away, a girl looks toward the lake in the distance, as if sinking into the meadow, while the bright-eyed black cat at her feet draws the viewer back into the scene. Its piercing gaze introduces a subtle sense of unease, as though it were watching something not yet visible to us. The cat and the figure become witnesses to one another in this quiet, unforced coexistence, gently unsettling each other.

MAZZARIOL’s painterly language is defined by brushwork that is at once free and controlled, creating a sense of interpenetration between figures and their surroundings. Through layered and overlapping colour, the image gradually takes shape between emergence and disappearance. The combination of acrylic, oil, and oil pastel creates varying rhythms and textures across the surface: some colours seem to sink into the underlying layers, while others remain on the surface, carrying traces of the artist’s physical gestures. In her work, colour shapes the atmosphere of the work, its sense of time, and its underlying psychological tension.

Throughout the exhibition, everyday life never settles into a single, coherent story. Instead, the works linger in moments that seem to fall just before or just after an event. Lawns, balconies, figures, and plants appear like traces left in the wake of a passing breeze. MAZZARIOL offers no fixed explanation for these moments, allowing them to remain open and inviting the viewer to look slowly for details that never fully reveal themselves yet continue to shape the image. Familiar scenes are gently unsettled, retaining their intimacy while opening onto something more elusive and quietly uneasy.