Giusy Lauriola, an Italian artist born and residing in Rome, where she has her studio.
Lauriola‘s technique manifests itself in an astonishingly eloquent and engaging manner. Colors play a central role, not merely as pigments but as carriers of deep, hidden emotions. Her brushstrokes seem to channel a primordial instinct, as if each touch were an unconscious call to the energy of nature.
The texture she creates is captivating: resin adds a material dimension that transforms the flat canvas surface into a tactile, almost sculptural place. The contrast between fluidity and structure is evident in the way resin integrates with acrylic and enamel, creating a dialogue between the liquid and solid, the instinctual and the intentional.
This combination of materials emphasizes an artistic process that appears as deliberate as it is instinctive. There is a visible tension between the figurative and the abstract, inviting the viewer to explore each work as an inner landscape. Each of her creations feels like a powerful reflection on the dualism between the visible and invisible, on what emerges and what remains hidden, compelling the observer to question and immerse themselves in a suspended, intimate, and vibrant dimension.
The use of space, often empty or undefined, imparts a metaphysical quality to her works, evoking a realm beyond time and space, like a window opened onto the unconscious.
Lauriola‘s remarkable ability to modulate light and color becomes almost a meditative act, inviting the viewer to “close their eyes” and perceive the work through sensitivity rather than sight. This gestural and free approach distinguishes her, imbuing her work with a depth that connects her inner world with the outer one. Over time, the artist has also succeeded in maintaining a guiding thread across the different series she has created, preserving a thematic coherence and an ability to explore universal emotions. These are expressed with an original approach to materials and through the harmony she creates between abstraction and figuration—central elements of her poetics of color and form.
In 2004, her first exhibition took place. Recent exhibitions include: 2024: Linea Sottile – Palazzo Marziale, Sorrento (curated by Rossella Savarese); Sospesi nella Natura – Spazio Cima Gallery, Rome; 2023: Il cielo in una stanza – Auditorium di San Pancrazio, Tarquinia (curated by Hans Achtner); Chiudi gli occhi – Aranciera di San Sisto, Rome, and Artetika Gallery, Palermo (curated by Federica di Stefano and critical text by Carlo Ercoli); 2022: Prendiamo il sentiero paludoso per arrivare alle nuvole – Galleria Umberto Mastroianni at the San Salvatore in Lauro Museums, Rome (curated by Federica di Stefano and critical texts by Manuela De Leonardis and Carlo Ercoli); 2021: International SyArt Festival Sorrento, Villa Fiorentino – Fondazione Sorrento; Illustrated boards for the editorial project Guido Levi, una storia piena di Paure, di ansie e di avvenimenti quasi gialli, curated by Manuela De Leonardis; Amabie, La Magica Profezia dello Yōkai – Mo.C.A. Studio Gallery, Rome (curated by Manuela De Leonardis); 2020: Perimetro Infinito – Spazio Cima Gallery, Rome; 2019: Domino/Dominio per gioco e per davvero – MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome; About Dreams, Mo.C.A. – Studio Gallery, Rome; Apolidi/identità non disperse – Palazzo Merulana, Rome.
AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS
In 2021, at the SyArt Sorrento International Festival, she received the prestigious Arbiter Fata Verde Award, and in 2022, she was featured on the cover of Arbiter magazine. She also received an Honorable Mention from the Circle Foundation for the Arts in 2020 and 2022 and was a finalist in major awards such as the Premio Lupa 2020 and the Celeste Prize 2007. In 2015, she won the Museo Pier Maria Rossi competition. Her works are held in prestigious collections, including the Copelouzos Family Art Museum in Athens, the SanPaolo Invest Art Collection in Rome, and the Antonio Sapone Municipal Art Gallery in Gaeta. From 2021 to 2024, she participated in numerous contemporary art fairs, including Arte in Nuvola in Rome and fairs in Genoa, Padua, and Parma. In 2020, she was included in the Atlas of Contemporary Art by De Agostini, one of the most comprehensive surveys of Italian artists since 1950. Her career has led her to exhibit internationally, as an honored guest at the International Photo Festival in Lodz, Poland, in 2006, and in solo exhibitions at prestigious venues such as the Italian Cultural Institute in Damascus in 2010 and the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo in 2024, for Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Critical texts for her catalogs have been written by Giorgia Calò, Maurizio Calvesi, Antonietta Campilongo, Cristina Del Ferraro, Manuela De Leonardis, Federica Di Stefano, Micol Di Veroli, Barbara Drudi, Carlo Ercoli, Gianluca Marziani, Manuela Pacelli, Sergio Rispoli, and Agnieszka Zakrzewicz.
CRITICAL TEXT.
Artist Giusy Lauriola in her consistent artistic journey remains true to herself. In her recent pictorial works, the lymphatic texture is the same as in her origins, yet induces us into the groove of a renewed splendor. Liquid matter floats and with it bodies emptied from the heavy material condition, suggesting abundance and levity, awakening and torpor, union and never separation. Lauriola speaks to us of beauty, wisdom and perimeters overcome in the changing intention of bodies to evolve, to aspire to be something else and nothing.
In the female subjects, on the other hand, she decisively reveals a body that in the process of evaporation leaves incisive traces of the self. An indelible message given by the incisive stroke of black outlines, a nervous flicker that holds the whole, maintains and fixes the pigment and resin so skillfully and abundantly lavished on canvas or paper. There is no point of junction or even separation in her narrative but a genuine attempt to be liquid matter.
Rossella Savarese