Nicola Aramu

Artist Statement

I am an Italian artist from Venice where I studied painting and printmaking at the Accademia di Belle Arti. My paintings are inspired by nature, history and memories. The subjects of my works are often based on black-and-white vintage photographs I have been collecting for years. Transforming them into paintings, I tend to give these souvenirs a second life and to save them from getting lost or being forgotten. By combining public images as part of our collective Memory with snapshots of private origin, I seek to create a fantastic, sometimes ambiguous poetry that questions our memory and imagination. In this respect, I use colour to create new visual emotions.

Nature is another central topic of my work, as shown in "Water Landscapes" – a series of landscape paintings dedicated to the element of water from more or less classical points of view. They range from abstract colour studies and impressionistic landscape paintings to poetic compositions in which the lines between reality and phantasy are often blurred. In so doing, my water landscapes are reflections of nature and projection screens for the viewer’s imagination alike".