Claudia Di Francesco
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 5 min read
Claudia Di Francesco is an artist from Rome, currently living in Florence. She makes paintings and sculptures, often using resin, silicone, and paper. Her process includes layering materials, which lets the forms change gradually. She gathers impressions from different places, memories, and small visual details. In her painting “Cruel Romanticism in Gold,” light and atmosphere move slowly across the surface. Her sculptures, like “Mineral Life,” transform from simple shapes into forms that appear both natural and crafted.
Q: Your work often feels delicate but strong. What kind of energy are you drawn to when you start something new?
A: Before I begin to paint, a perceptual threshold opens for me, an in-between space where personal and environmental energies come into resonance. From this vibration emerges a monochromatic emotional impulse, an affective tone that orients both gaze and gesture.
From there, inner images and material suggestions surface: architectural fragments, time-worn surfaces, archaeological elements. I do not perceive them as simple visual references but as active forces, vectors of energy. I absorb, integrate, and transform them into a layered, synesthetic mental constellation.
The act of painting thus becomes a perceptual transfiguration: from sensory memory, an autonomous visual language takes form, suspended between reality and evocation.
To clarify my process, I think of a work I am currently developing, a piece that continues to return silent gazes within the studio.
Its origin traces back to a visit to Lecce (Puglia), when I entered the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie with sea salt still on my skin and the shimmer of water still in my eyes. The white walls, crossed by delicate cracks, evoked an ambivalent perception of both welcome and melancholy. Those marks, with their organic nature, became visual matrices, while the golden, rarefied light impressed a sense of suspension.
This memory overlapped with an earlier experience in Florence, the city where I live, where the formal balance and quiet presence of Renaissance faces left a silent imprint. The two visions merged into a stratified mental composition.
Within the painting process, these impressions never remain descriptive: they are broken down, layered, and recomposed until they generate a new perceptual spatiality.
Q: Time seems to move differently in your paintings. Do you think about moments fading or lasting?
A: In truth, when I paint, I think about the time to come. There is a kind of temporal suspension in which the past manifests itself in the present, and the present becomes a threshold, an intermediate space of awareness and understanding.
What interests me is not time as something that fades or endures, but a time that does not yet fully exist, a time projected forward, connected to the future. Not a future as expectation or hope, but as an open question, as a space not yet graspable. It is within this undefined dimension that, for me, time finds its place in painting.
Q: “Cruel Romanticism in Gold” feels emotional and precise at once. What was behind that mix?
A: “Cruel Romanticism in Gold” is a painting born from observing the sea at different times of day, in different places, and through equally distant sensations. It is a stratification of visions and memories: on one side, the sea of the Apulian coast on a night when the only light came from its reflection on the water, creating a suspended, almost unreal moment; on the other, the sea of Ostia, my hometown, at sunset, when the sky projects itself onto the water and the sea absorbs the sun’s final rays, returning golden, luminous reflections like tiny stars scattered across the surface.
What I wanted to capture is not simply an emotion, calling it that would be reductive, but an intimate and, at the same time, expanded perception: that feeling of beauty certain natural elements transmit to us, one that we cannot immediately decipher but only come to understand over time.
The precision of the work emerges from this vision: first, the deep black, midnight blue of the Apulian sea; then, the white and golden reflections of the light, creating a warm shimmering effect on the water. A dark sea, crossed by golden nuances and luminous points. It is from this dual, nocturnal and twilight perception that the painting was born.
Q: Paper in your work feels alive and reactive. What keeps you coming back to it?
A: For me, paper is a living element, capable of immediately activating a sensitive perception of the mark. It stimulates me through its ability to absorb and its deeply unpredictable nature: each time it reacts differently, unexpectedly, and it is precisely this unpredictability that fascinates me.
The dialogue with the paper begins even before color. I work directly by mounting it, preparing the surface with an almost tactile attention: I touch it, I listen to it, I try to perceive its tensions, its fibers, its capacity to receive or resist. This initial moment is a form of active, almost intuitive listening. In art, there is always a moment when control must be relinquished, after the planning phase, allowing the gesture to emerge freely. The paper accompanies me in this dimension; it becomes a collaborator, a true interlocutor.
Q: There’s a quiet unpredictability in how you work. How do you find the point where you stop changing things?
A: The truth is, I understand when to stop working on a piece the moment there’s nothing left to add. It happens when, after being fully immersed in the details, I step back and look at the painting from a different, more neutral, almost detached distance. In that instant, I perceive it as complete: it no longer requires any action, neither subtraction nor addition. It’s as if the work itself stops asking.
Q: Has your process changed how you see small, ordinary materials in daily life?
A: If, in everyday life, an element captures my attention: a color, a reflection, a particular quality of light, I tend to absorb it and weave it into other ongoing explorations. That image, or rather that perception, then becomes something focal, compelling, and necessary. It’s as if I claim it as my own, and from that moment arises an urgency, sometimes a challenge, other times a pure sensory need to translate and transform it through painting.
At times, small archives of images or chromatic perceptions take shape in my mind, almost like an inner photographic memory. These archives are never static: they constantly shift, merge with the present, and evolve into something else. This is where I draw from when I paint, I select what feels closest to the sensation the work itself conveys to me in that precise moment. It’s a circular and sensory process in which vision, memory, and painterly gesture merge into a single flow.
