Artworks by Veronica Ciccarese

I am a painter born in Apulia, in a beautiful place by the sea called Salento. Ever since I was a child, I have been drawn to photography and painting. Over the years, I have cultivated my greatest passion—painting—through rigorous self-taught studies in artists' workshops. My works are painted on canvas or sometimes on MDF, and I use oil colors. It is a soft, luminous, and wonderfully malleable medium. My painting is instinctive. My artistic research is a constant investigation into the female universe, captured in its most intimate and psychological dimension. While in the past my narrative moved through vintage atmospheres, today my work is evolving toward a symbolic and timeless language. The female figures I paint inhabit suspended spaces, settings where reality gives way to personal myth. In this new journey, the presence of the animal becomes central: it is not a mere decorative element, but the personification of our most hidden self. It represents primordial instinct, ancestral fears, and the shadows we carry within. Through this connection between woman and animal nature, I seek to give visible form to what is concealed, transforming the canvas into a mirror of the female unconscious. My painting investigates the thin threshold where reality unravels to give way to the dreamlike and surreal dimension. At the center of this universe stands the female figure, understood not as a mere aesthetic subject, but as an archetype—the guardian of an ancient mystery and the vehicle for profound inner research. My artistic journey moves along the border separating the human being from the natural, instinctive world. This journey expresses itself through two complementary visions: the body that transforms and the face that reveals. In my works, the woman's body and face are never isolated from the cosmos, but fuse and reflect themselves in a constant similitude with the animal world. This connection does not represent a regression, but rather a revelation: the animal—be it fierce, fragile, nocturnal, or a predator—emerges as the visible extension of the female unconscious, a symbolic alter ego that manifests its most intimate and unconfessable states of mind. Through surreal combinations and atmospheres suspended in time, the woman and the animal share the same gaze, the same posture, the same silent dignity. The wild element thus becomes a key to decoding the emotional complexity of the female figure: her resilient strength, her vulnerability, her capacity for mutation, and her visceral bond with the rhythms of nature. In the portraits, the animal presence becomes quiet, but does not disappear: it takes refuge entirely in the gaze. Stripping the canvas of anthropomorphic elements and focusing solely on the face, I try to capture that same untamed and ancestral essence. The eyes become the threshold through which shines that pure, mysterious, and undomesticated instinct we share with the creatures of the earth. Whether it is a wing unfolding on a back or a shadow crossing a pupil, my goal remains the same: to portray the soul in its wildest, naked, and most authentic truth.