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 ...

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