VOLUPIA

Volupia

Volupia - pigment, titanium dioxide, resin, engraving, butyl acrylic on canvas 220 x 370 cm • 86.61 x 145.67 in

There exists a moment in artistic creation when violence becomes genesis, and I have inhabited it fully whilst conceiving this canvas that bears the name of an ancient Roman deity of voluptuousness. Yet here, voluptuousness is not sensual abandonment: it is creative tension, that primordial force which compels the artist to battle first with matter, then with oneself.

The ground of this work springs from hand-to-hand combat with fragments of wood and metal, from a gesture that belongs more to industrial archaeology than to traditional painting. I hammered, scratched, lacerated the surface until I achieved that vibration of squares which resonates like morse code of contemporaneity. It is the language of the city, of the building site, of modernity bursting into the atelier like an unexpected yet necessary guest. And yet, from this cacophony is born silence: that of the female jaguar emerging from chaos like Venus from the waves, but with the savage majesty of pre-Columbian America.

The Panthera onca I have painted is not merely a feline: it is the incarnation of Tezcatlipoca, the "lord of the smoking mirror" of the Aztecs, deity of night and wind who could assume jaguar form to traverse worlds. Its spots, which the Maya called "stars fallen to earth," here become constellations of a parallel universe where beauty needs no justification. With brushes slender as embroidery needles—tools almost ridiculous for so vast a canvas—I caressed every hair, every nuance of this coat bearing the colours of European autumn fused with tropical fire.

There is something profoundly feminine in this jaguar, a femininity that manifests not in conventional grace but in awareness of its own strength. The fact that in reality this feline does not roar but emits delicate, almost melodious sounds, becomes metaphor for a power that needs not display itself. It is the same power I have sought to infuse into my pictorial gesture: the capacity to be monumental whilst remaining whispered.

Fosca painting Volupia

The flowers surrounding her are not decoration but votive offerings, chromatic ex-votos shaping a secular altar to beauty. I painted them with the minuteness of a medieval miniaturist, because I believed—and still believe—that every petal must possess the same ontological dignity as the whole. They are impossible flowers, born from my travel memories yet transfigured by expressive urgency, flowers existing only in that limbo between memory and imagination which is art's true territory.

The work springs from memory of an ancient mosaic where a deity sat upon a sacred jaguar. I chose to eliminate the deity because I understood that the sacred was already wholly contained within the animal, in its magnetic presence, in its capacity to bridge the savage and domestic worlds, instinct and reflection. It is a painting that speaks of suspension: that of the raised paw, that of the gaze intercepting ours, that of time dilating in the instant of encounter.

Ultimately, painting this jaguar was a means of reconciling myself with my most savage part, that which civilisation would tame but which art knows how to keep alive. It is the portrait of feminine force that does not apologise for existing, that does not hide behind conventions, that knows how to be gentle without renouncing fearfulness.

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Volupia in situ