Italian visual srtist and art historian Serena Scapagnini’s latest work Hemispheres, is currently on display in the Pio Monte della Misericordia Church in Naples, Italy, alongside Caravaggio’s masterpiece The Seven Works of Mercy. So it was no surprise to us that she will be joining the Yale Quantum Institute for a year long residence.
We were lucky enough to ask her some questions, tracing her life forward to this incredible moment.
Tell us about your childhood
The nature of memories changes colour over time. So, had I been faced with this question at another time in my life, I think I would have told you some delicate story, to be re-elaborated, to be re-painted. Instead, today, as I sift through my childhood days in Italy, what shines through is mostly a sense of magic. The sense of a premonition. In fact, I found it indeed very interesting how my most significant artworks, that have unfolded over time, share an image, a premonition, among the episodes, real or imagined, of my childhood.
How did you become an artist? Can you talk about your creative process, a day in your life?
I mentioned the sense of premonition in the artwork, traceable to childhood.
In this sense, the artistic process is linked to an innate gaze, strongly intuitive, perhaps genetic (my grandmother, Laura Caravita di Sirignano, was an exceptional painter). Then, the years of training between Paris and New York were certainly a turning point in this journey, but I believe that art has mostly revealed itself in the silences—rustling and hypnotic—that form that perceptive bridge between the subject and the world.
I remember a particularly vivid episode from when I was a young girl at school.
I was listening to a lesson, swaying along with the professor’s words, grasping their meaning but largely neglecting the logic. In that protected hypnosis, I realized that my hands, often busy drawing according to a shared line of pre-existing images, had instead taken a new path. I began creating drawings whose rhythm, whose visual identity, was somehow foreign to my will but strongly determined to manifest themselves, in a form of autopoiesis that has never left my work.
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