There is a certain kind of silence that precedes a storm, and there is another — rarer, more deliberate — that follows a long exhalation. The paintings of Giusy Lauriola belong to this second silence. They do not impose themselves; they wait. And in waiting, they open.
Born and working in Rome, Lauriola has spent the better part of two decades refining a visual language that moves steadily inward, away from the clamour of the social and the documentary, toward a territory where memory, the body, and emotion become indistinguishable from the light that passes through them. Her early works, rooted in photographic imagery and digital intervention, spoke of the city — its fractures, its frictions, its hurried geometries. But something in that language began to shed its skin. The urban gave way to the intimate. The sharp edge of reportage softened into the liquid drift of pigment suspended in resin.
That resin — which Lauriola has called her silent accomplice — is the true medium of her maturity. It holds. It reflects. It allows colour to breathe and shift, to expand across the canvas with a slow, tidal deliberation. The surfaces she builds are not flat but inhabited: layers of transparent and translucent material stacked like sediment in a riverbed, catching light not as an external event but as something that seems to issue from within. One does not so much look at these works as enter them — they are atmospheres before they are images.
In her current series, Geografie Interiori — Interior Geographies — this quality reaches its fullest articulation. The works are landscapes, but landscapes stripped of geographical certainty: horizons dissolve into washes of blue and ochre, water and sky trade places, matter forgets its borders. Tiny figures traverse these expanses like punctuation marks in a long, unwritten sentence — minimal, almost accidental presences that nevertheless anchor the entire emotional register of the canvas. We are not looking at a place; we are looking at the condition of being in a place, of passing through it with nothing but the weight of one’s own interiority.
The figures in Lauriola’s work are never fully revealed. They appear as silhouettes, as gestures half-erased, as residues of an encounter that has already happened or is yet to occur. In the series Sentimenti Sospesi — Suspended Feelings — two faceless bodies lean toward one another in a space defined only by the bleeding of colour. The painting does not tell us whether they are meeting or parting. The tension between proximity and distance, between speech and silence, becomes the real subject. Lauriola understands that the most profound human connections are not those we narrate but those we inhabit wordlessly, in the delicate territory between what is said and what remains unspeakable.
This is an art of thresholds. The threshold between the real and the imagined, between the material and the dreamed, between what the hand can control and what the resin decides for itself. Lauriola has spoken of her creative process as a dialogue between impulse and restraint, between the deliberate gesture and the unpredictable behaviour of her materials. The result is a body of work that feels both composed and surrendered — as if the painter has learned to trust the drift.
In recent years, this research has expanded beyond the two-dimensional surface. Her luminous sculptures — works in which light itself becomes a plastic, tangible substance — extend the logic of her canvases into physical space. Here too, the principle is the same: light is not something that falls on form; it is something that becomes form. The sculptures glow from within, like memory made visible, like the afterimage of a thought.
The echoes one detects in Lauriola’s work are those of a well-digested tradition. From Mario Schifano she has absorbed the force of colour as a direct, unmediated emotional charge; from Egon Schiele, the tensile energy of a line that seems to tremble between anguish and tenderness; from Gustav Klimt, a sensuous reverence for the feminine as a principle of creation and embodiment. Yet these influences are not quoted but metabolised. Lauriola’s voice is her own — quieter, perhaps, than her predecessors’, but no less certain.
That voice has been heard across a remarkable itinerary of exhibitions. From the MACRO in Rome to the Correale Museum in Sorrento, from the Italian Cultural Institutes of Tokyo and Damascus to the Copelouzos Family Art Museum in Athens, her work has traversed geographies as varied as the inner landscapes she paints. The year 2025 saw the travelling exhibition Svanire — To Fade — presented at the Vaccheria of Rome, the Auditorium of San Pancrazio in Tarquinia, and the Correale Museum of Sorrento, a triptych of venues that traced the arc of her inquiry into disappearance and presence. That same year, she was named a finalist of the Singulart International Women’s Day Award — a recognition that arrives at a moment when her work seems to be gathering a new kind of gravity.
The year 2026, still young, has already brought Geografie Interiori at Barnes in Rome and MindsWitch at BorghiniArteContemporanea, curated by Tamara Borghini — two exhibitions that feel less like summaries than like thresholds themselves, pointing toward directions yet to unfold.
What remains constant across this trajectory is a quality difficult to name but impossible to mistake. Lauriola’s work does not argue. It does not declare. It proposes — softly, insistently — that the most real geography is the one we carry within us. Her paintings are not windows onto another world; they are mirrors held at a slight angle, catching the light of this one, revealing the invisible cartography of what we feel but cannot say.
In an age of noise, she offers suspension. In an age of speed, she offers the slow, patient work of resin settling into its final transparency. Her art is an invitation to stop — to stand at the threshold, to wait, and to see what emerges from the depths.
Photo credits: From the artists’ archive
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