by Carole Dazzi e Romina Ciulli
The work of artist Lorenzo Di Lucido originates from a vibrant reflection on the foundations of traditional painting, reimagining landscapes and portraits through a progressive shift towards abstract form, emerging from the surface of the canvas trasnsformed by layers of color. His artworks, often monochrome, manifest a subtle internal tension between the material accumulated brushstroke after brushstroke, and the light that strikes it, to reach the perfect balance, the moment when, according to the artist, something happens.
How was your encounter with painting? You’ve described it as a gradual process..
Yes, rather than gradually, I was late, as I first approached the traditional tools of drawing and graphics, and only some time later I did come to painting. This is partly due to my nature, and partly due to some fears I have. In general, I’m afraid of starting anything, and then there was the academic aspect. As a boy, I didn’t enroll in an art school, but in an art institute which emphasized workshops and good hand exercises, so to speak, but which lacked any aspects related to the practice of painting. So I started later, just at the academy, basically. I’m not an enfant prodige, far from it. Or at least for me it all started a little later, but I have to say it wasn’t a big problem. I learned from myself and from others around me, from my classmates, painter friends, and from my teachers, like everyone else, in my own time and means, but in a very natural way, trying, trying again, obviously making mistakes and correcting them. Everything was normal.
Three fundamental concepts emerge in your pictorial research: cancellation, occurrence, tension. These elements can be defined as the foundations from which this research begins and re-starts, both physically and ideally. Can you tell us about them?
Et in arcadia ego. Those three elements emerged in a conversation with a person who is no longer with us and whom I would like to remember, Fabrizio De Fabritiis. A highly curious and intellectually acute person, whom I unfortunately met too little and too late, despite being from the same area. He was the author, among other things, of a blog called La città vegetale. Death still disgusts me, it has a bad taste, or at least it seems that way at the moment. I’ll make peace with it, perhaps, but not now. Returning to the topic of your question, these are three elements, but not the only ones, of my way of painting. I believe that every painting, at best, contains a world within it. The fact is that the further I go, the more I believe that discourses and concepts become blurred, less clear, or more complex. I was saying in that conversation with Fabrizio that a painting appears when what we call an image emerges on the surface, which is also a tension of the surface, its taking on body and substance, a banality, in short, but true. Furthermore, often, though not always or necessarily, I paint the same painting several times. That’s why I call it cancellation.
An occurrence, well the emergence of an image on the surface is an occurrence, a factual event. Whether it’s a canvas, a surface onto which a film is projected, a photographic film, a daguerreotype exposed to sideways light, an engraving on a zinc plate, a digital projection, or a digital print, they do, in fact, happen. The image is also this, an occurrence. Just think of how many small, great things can happen on a few square centimeters of canvas while a painter works, think of how many gestures, how many changes, how many brushstrokes go into composing an image. It happened, it occurred, and now the painting is there before us thanks to a succession of events, small catastrophes of language. But it’s only a point of view, limited to a specific episode or period. Today I could have other things in mind, I could think of something else, with the same tools. This is the beauty of painting, simple tools with which complex operations can be performed.
The initial phase of drawing represents a fundamental step for the future structure of your projects. What role does it play in your painting practice?
In this case, it depends mostly on my instability. I mean, there are times when I draw a lot, and some drawings, some notes, become the basis for the adventure of painting, which then develops freely and indipendently. It’s not, in fact, constrained, let’s say, by a graphic or drawing cage, at least in the best cases. Then there’s a large portion of drawings that arise very spontaneously and freely, purely out of a sense of observation, to better understand, to try to interpret or make something, anything, my own. Or on a whim, in absolute freedom, as a game of emptying my head of the images that pervade it. Representing something through drawing is always interesting, it makes you understand so many things. It’s a small instrument of power, of possession, a tool for understanding even the loss, the potential possibilities of an image. Drawing is God-sign, a versatile, fun, intelligent and free tool. A beautiful thing that I do, even in this case, with extreme indifference. Maybe for a while I draw a lot, and then for a few months I don’t draw at all. I’m selfish in art, very much, so I do what I feel I need when I feel I need it, or even nothing at all.
Looking at your work, at first glance we might define it as abstract. Thinking of Tenda e tavola di Grizzana (2021), or Un pezzo di prato e il carnevale (2025), or Un fiore. Pensando a Francesco Siracusa (2025). However, if we linger carefully, tracing the surface, and finally observing the way the material has been transformed, layered by the brushstrokes, we become aware of how the works convey their own internal tension, suggesting shapes, objects, and faces. A sort of interplay of references between the desire to represent a recognizable image, and the distancing from a subject that distinctly refers to the world as we usually observe it. What, then, is the relationship between figuration and abstraction for you? And how does it develop in your pictorial process?
In this case, I make no distinctions. If I go to the studio today and want to paint a flower, I paint a flower, in my own way. Or if I want to paint a picture in a certain color, I do it, or maybe not. I do what I want, or what I can do in that particular moment with what I have in my hands and in my head. So I don’t worry about the sometimes very blurred boundaries between abstract and figurative. I’ve never been an abstract painter, and I’ve never been a figurative painter neither, at least I think so. I like to paint and nurture what is always and in any case an image. Sometimes I’m interested in the ways in which painting gives birth to a certain color on the surface, with its own internal vibration, or an image with its strength and structure, simultaneously crystalline and trembling, stable and evanescent. I like the opportunity to reflect on how ambiguous an image is, how strong and yet weak it is at the same time. Many of my paintings are like this. A very dear friend of mine, the extraordinary painter Giovanni Blanco, a few months ago, while looking at some paintings gathered for an exhibition, told me he felt as if he were being caressed by slaps. “A caress given in slaps,” he said. And he hit the nail on the head, he always does. I find it beautiful, and I wish it were true. Let’s leave aside images or supposed abstractions. With my paintings, I would also like to convey what I feel when I paint them, an anger that is also sweetness and vice versa. Caresses like slaps and slaps like caresses. But both, not just caresses, not just slaps.
In some of your works, such as Il collassato (2025), Un quadro è come un pezzo di natura (2021), Le fiamme (2024 – 2025), or Iracondo (2025), we notice a progressive, if not total, transition to monochrome tones. A single color that, spread layer upon layer, concentrates the tension on the surface, on the nuances and on the effects that light produces on the canvas. How important is color in your works? And above all, why did you choose green as the dominant shade in most of your pieces?
The transition wasn’t gradual. In fact, it happened quite quickly. Simply, after a work session lasting several hours, I found myself with a painting in my hands and looking at it, instead of dismissing it as a failure because it was different from what I had originally envisioned, I accepted it and listened to it. I also listened to the opinions and words of my studio partner at the time, Elia Gobbi, another extraordinary painter in my opinion, and unfortunately little-known, too little. Usually I listen to people, especially painters, some painters. That way of painting was strange and new to me, opening up new possibilities. So I said to myself, let’s tread this path for a while, take a stretch of the road like this, with this inside and out. In painting, I behave like an alpinist, always looking for a new route, and I don’t much like over-traveled paths. Then, if I meet someone along the way, that’s fine, very good, fellow travelers, ghosts. And if my work isn’t new or innovative, it doesn’t matter, it has nothing to do with it. There are other aspects, no less important, at least to me and in my eyes.
The green, that green, why? Well, because after several attempts I noticed that it changes greatly depending on the light that hits it, and I think that’s important, I think it’s simultaneously bright and dark, and that also interested me, concerned me. A certain instability, elusiveness, yet they are physical works, sometimes very corporeal, but elusive. Furthermore, they are designed only for the eye of the human observer. They eschew the technical stratagems of photography, electric lights, and spotlights typical of many contemporary art spaces. From this point of view, they are traditional paintings, born in a light that even outside the studio requires, almost desperately. Today, fortunately, significant progress is being made even in commercial galleries. But let’s face it, for many years lighting was a nightmare for painting, destroying it or faking it by denaturalizing it, making it artificial, squalid and holographic. The same thing happened in churches, where for 50 cents you could abort any blossoming on a canvas or any fresco. Today, we’re healing a little, thanks also to an intelligent use of lighting technology, a new way of illuminating. And perhaps we’ve understood the devastation of the recent past, at least I hope, where you blasted watts at random on a painting created in a studio with light coming from a window or, in some cases, even a few candles, or under the sunlight on a winter morning.
The series Ritratti (2020), Due ritratti in rosa (2025), and Da alcune cose non ti liberi (2025), are instead all portraits. In these works, the physiognomy of a figure is represented with a few hinted, fleeting, almost undefined features, but which, through their identity, be it real or imaginary, evoke a certain intimacy and suggestion. These are works that are very different from the other works, as there is almost an annulment of figures and objects. Can you tell us about these paintings and what it means to create a portrait?
They are actually the product of the beginning of my journey. For a while, as a boy, I painted self-portraits in which I erased my image, where erasure became an affirmation of identity. Erasing to reveal. It was partly a habit, tied to showing the technical processes through which a painting is born, stopping before the definitive point of arrival. In some ways, I wanted to show a painting that was born through collapses. At the time, I used only shades of gray. In the larger canvases, however, hints of landscapes or faded, broken, veiled figures were piled up, as if different paintings had ended up one on top of the other in a transparency that made them all visible at once.
Obviously, paradoxically, the colors were opaque, covering. For me these paintings represent one of my faces, one of the ways in which I sometimes want to paint. For me representation is an exercise that doesn’t distance, it’s a blurred, contorted, multiple vision. Representation has always been a clinical exercise in subtle cruelty. Trite but true, representing is a petty crime. You take possession of something, you make it yours and you violate its intimacy. In a way, you kill what you represent. Painters, more or less all of them, are aware of this aspect. For me, creating a portrait is above all the display of all the ways in which a portrait is created. From the first to the last brushstroke, in succession.
How is a face born on canvas? How that particular shade of ochre or pink is born, I show it. I’m not afraid, I have no secrets, and I’m not an absolute admirer of virtuosity, especially when it’s an end in itself, obviously. The ancients didn’t paint at all like some painters of today and the day before would have us believe. They didn’t paint by dividing the painting into individual work sections. The surface was developed all at once, integrally, layer by layer, and without tricks. We need to look at Beato Angelico, Giovanni Bellini, not the sycophants of part of the 18th century or a certain part of the 19th century. Painters who had lost a language, entire chunks of a vocabulary no longer available, but who still wanted to construct very long discourses made of very long chit-chat. Well, the discussion is getting out of hand, I’ll stop here.
How do you choose the titles of your works? What role do they play in your projects? Un altro quadro a cui segue un altro quadro (2020), Un quadro è come un pezzo di natura (2021), Due piccoli rosa instabili e una foglia anti graziosa (2025), just to name a few, are titles that seem to begin a story that the viewer is asked to rediscover while observing the canvas.
The titles came from the type of thought that started my painting. They seem, and actually are, an internal discourse, a kind of rumination of thoughts about painting, or sometimes they relate to a certain state of mind I carry within me, an emotional state often that of a stutterer.
A discourse resumed, interrupted, continually chewed over and put forth in words like bolus. They are a hint from which the observer can start if they want, but sometimes not. Sometimes they are little traps, like a road that leads you lost in the woods. I don’t think I’m good with titles, not at all. They are more of a personal matter, a line of reasoning of mine that, like Tondelli’s notes to friends, is difficult to unravel. They remain gaps, mysteries. It’s personal, even if they accompany paintings that can be seen. Perhaps they are the most intimate part of my work. They don’t play a role in my projects, they are, so to speak, pieces of a conversation which takes place in my head when I walk down the street with my thoughts, or when I stroll around the studio looking at what happened and which I only noticed in parts or only afterwards, too late.
Are there any artists who have influenced your work or continue to inspire it?
More than artists, there are paintings, individual paintings, or a few paintings by many artists, mostly deceased, but not exclusively. Some of the painters I’ve mentioned are truly points of reference, even if, fortunately, they paint in very different ways from mine. Giovanni Blanco is certainly a role model, in many ways. For part of my journey, I owe a lot to many friends and classmates from my formative years in Bologna. Lorenzo Tamai, who I consider a brilliant painter. Elia Gobbi, for a variety of reasons, has been a companion to me as a classmate for several years, and I’m grateful to him for the conversations and moments we shared. I love Giulio Catelli very much, who is a close friend. I see him very little, but we know we run after each other in our thoughts. I often think of many other painters who I feel are friends, close in nature and temperament. The list would be long and would risk keeping out, due to space constraints, people who are actually in. The room of a painter’s heart should be quite spacious.
What are your future plans?
I’m currently opening an exhibition in Bologna dedicated to Francesco Siracusa, curated by the brilliant Gabriele Salvaterra, and featuring painters who are also friends, as described above. Then in February I’m opening a very beautiful project in Milan, sponsored by Lorenzo Tamai, featuring a series of great painters who are quite intimidating. Then I’ll be exhibiting in March in a project, also curated by Gabriele Salvaterra, which sees me alongside Luca Coser, and here too the awe is reverential. Then we’ll see. I can’t have or follow too many things, I get lost easily. I definitely have ideas for a couple of new painting series, hopefully containing everything needed to create good paintings.