About The Artist

PAOLA SANTAGOSTINO SHORT BIOGRAPHY

My artistic language was born from a personal experience: when I give any serious speech I need "paper and pencil", not to take notes, but to "trace signs" that follow the concatenation of my thoughts, I automatically draw symbols, connection lines, schemes and schemes, every now and then I write a word... My brain needs to connect with my hand to function more lucidly: through gesture I can visualize the flow of the discourse as a network of concepts, a cascade of associations, similarities, causes and effects, possible developments...

For many years I worked as a clinical psychologist and during the hours of therapy I drew thousands of mental maps: at the end of the sessions my patients were asking to keep those working sheets to "remember what we said". When I started studying at Brera Academy of Fine Arts, I decided to re-elaborate those psychoanalytic worksheets, to see if I could draw from them inspiration for my paintings. We all think in images: the image comes before the word, the structure comes before the thought, our unconscious mind elaborates visual sequences and connection schemes before formulating any sentence. In my paintings I give shape and colour to these images, I express through symbols the hidden pattern of our mental activity.

It has been a long journey and has taken years, but it continues to inspire and excite me. My artistic language has evolved over time and nowadays I believe that these signs are not a personal wimp of mine, nor a strictly individual form of expression, but rather a very ancient language, a form of pre-verbal communication, used by mankind since ever, since the geometric engravings of the Palaeolithic caves. Before the words was the gesture ...