by Carole Dazzi e Romina Ciulli
The artistic project of Annalisa Parisii is a captivating journey between the new creative possibilities offered by generative art and the certainties of traditional painting. Drawing on the atmospheres of Metaphysical Art and Magical Realism, the space of representation is a familiar, evolving place, suspended and silent. A space where the viewer is invited to reflect deeply on his own existence and the certainties of everyday life, encouraged to imagine new stories and magical dimensions.
Tell us how you became an artist…
I started drawing as a child. I loved reproducing Disney comic book covers. I eagerly awaited the weekly release so I could copy the first page. I was especially fascinated by the colors, shapes, and bold outlines. From then on I continued drawing, because it was something deeply rooted in me. Along the way, I attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and then the Academy of L’Aquila, but at a certain point I decided not to pursue it in the traditional way. I preferred to delve deeper and develop my artistic research independently.
Your artistic project seems to follow a continuum which relates to the very structure of the narrative. Whether it’s a character, a situation or a feeling being depicted, there’s a constant tension, an uninterrupted flow that runs through all your works and creates a strong connection between different pieces. The connection between colors that influence the perception of environments, saturation and brightness, the enigmatic clarity of faces. An intense reflection on the language of art, the perception of reality and even the very connection between past and present. How does this creative vision arise and develop?
My creative vision stems from a deeply personal relationship with painting and art history, but above all from the need to transform images into narrative. Not a linear tale, therefore, but a flow of episodes, variations, and returns. Even when the subjects change, I’m interested in maintaining a perceptual continuum, that is the sensation that each work is a fragment of the same world, a snapshot of the same story that continues elsewhere. In this process, color is a true narrative device. I work on saturation, brightness, and tonal relationships to construct emotional environments: spaces that seem familiar and, yet slightly out of place. This is where the “tension” that runs through the works is generated. An apparent calm that allows restlessness, desire, anticipation, and irony to emerge.
Even the figures and the faces, when they appear, respond to this logic: they are often clear, almost hyper-present, yet remain enigmatic, as if they were holding something back. I’m interested in that suspended zone where reality and imagination touch without fully explaining each other. An in-between time, an inhabited “interval,” which returns as a theme and a method. This is why I feel an affinity with Surrealism and a certain Magic Realism, but also with pop visual culture and sometimes more essential solutions. However, not as references, but rather as tools to bring together past and present, memory and contemporaneity. Ultimately, this vision develops as an ongoing exploration of the language of images and perception: each painting attempts to bring together what we see and what we intuit, leaving it up to the viewer to complete the story.
In your most recent work you explore the potential of artificial intelligence and the applications of digital drawing. It’s a complex art form, characterized by the duality of creative opportunity and ethical and professional challenge. What’s your relationship with AI? And what do you expect from this new creative stimulus?
My relationship with AI stems from a natural curiosity and a willingness to experiment. I approached it spontaneously, but very quickly realized it wasn’t just “a game,” but rather a new territory in which to evolve my research. In my recent works I use it as a testing ground: a space to generate variations, hybrids, narrative deviations and visual “accidents,” which I then select and rework, often through editing and image construction, sometimes in dialogue with tools like Photoshop and digital workflows. What interests me is the possibility of multiplying hypotheses, seeing how an idea changes if I shift a detail, alter an atmosphere, or take an image toward the metaphysical, pop, or minimal. In this sense, AI becomes a sort of “chamber of possibilities,” which fuels my continuity across series and my ability to construct coherent worlds, even across diverse subjects.
At the same time, however, I also sensed a significant limitation: the speed of the process. I often felt that this speed risked compromising the slow elaboration that, for me, is fundamental, the one necessary to build an intimate dialogue with the work. In my journey, in fact, time is not just a technical tool, but an integral part of the research. It is by being within the process, even slowly, that the meaning, form and depth of a work are truly defined. This is why I see AI as a very interesting tool, but one to be used with awareness, not as a replacement for artistic creation, but rather as a new creative stimulus, a means of exploration that can complement traditional practice, while maintaining personal vision, sensitivity and time for reflection as central.
Photoshop, 3D modeling softwares, and artificial intelligence are tools often used to create digital artwork. How do you employ these techniques and how do you integrate them with the more classic elements of pictorial tradition?
In my case, I don’t use 3D modeling softwares. I work primarily with tools like Photoshop and some artificial intelligence-based applications, which I use mainly as post-production tools, for visual experimentation and even for developing sketches. I take advantage of their unique features to work on the image, make changes, refine certain steps, study variations and expand the processing options. For me, however, these tools don’t replace pictorial work, they accompany it and, in some cases, help me sharpen insights that then find a more complete form in the artistic practice. Integration with the more classic elements of pictorial tradition occurs precisely in this dialogue: on one hand there are digital tools, which allow for speed and experimentation, on the other pictorial sensitivity remains central, made up of time, layering, gesture and the pursuit of the image. I always seek a balance between these two aspects. Digital offers me new possibilities, but the construction of the work remains profoundly tied to my personal vision and to a language born from painting.
Your works depict everyday objects, such as armchairs, laid tables, fruit baskets, gloves. And then landscapes and characters immersed in timeless places, silent still lifes, where real elements and surreal figures become part of a singular normality. The magical and the marvelous coexist without conflict in this new dimension, as in Re:load (2025) and The taster (2025). What is depicted transcends traditional representation, is enriched with symbolic meanings and seems to have a strong connection to themes such as the home in Interno con rosa (2026), family and affection in I cari (2026), Bill e io, 80′ (2025), time in Il futuro (2024) and Avec le temps (2025), evoking profound emotional resonances. How have these themes influenced your artistic journey? And what resonates in your works?
My work undoubtedly resonates with my own experiences, profoundly and inevitably. Even when I begin with everyday objects or seemingly simple scenes, I’m never interested in the representation itself, but rather in what those elements convey in terms of memory, affection, time and experience. Home, family, relationships, the passage of time are themes that have greatly influenced my artistic journey, because they are part of my personal history and my way of looking at the world. They are internal presences that often recur, sometimes explicitly, other times more subtly and symbolically.
I’m interested in working on this threshold between the real and the suspended: objects, faces, environments become tools for evoking an emotional dimension, rather than simply describing something descriptively. Even the most commonplace detail, like an armchair, a table, a piece of fruit, a glove, can transform into a sign charged with meaning, capable of suggesting a story, a lack, a presence. What resonates in my works, therefore, is a personal memory which attempts to open up to a more universal dimension: the desire to belong, the fragility of affections, the stratification of time and that subtle line where the everyday can become mysterious, poetic, even visionary.
The representation of dreamlike phenomena is a central theme in the art of surrealism and magical realism, movements you clearly reference to. In fact, Psiche series (2024), is a project dedicated to the theme of dreams as a revealer of the unconscious, and to psychoanalysis. The works included in it seem to be an invitation to reflect on aspects of existence which are still unexplored, on desires, but also on fears and profound psychic forces that escape ordinary logic to investigate more intimate truths. It is the unconscious that protects some truth still hidden. Can you tell us about this project?
The Psiche series was born from a profound interest in dreams as a space of revelation, a place where images, symbols and presences emerge that often escape the logic of everyday life. In this project I wanted to explore precisely that suspended dimension, where the unconscious is not something to be explained rationally, but rather to be listened to and explored. I’m fascinated by the idea that dreams can contain intimate, hidden truths not yet fully formulated. It’s a dimension where desires, fears, memories and profound tensions coexist, and where images take on a powerful symbolic value. For this reason the Psiche series is also a project linked to psychoanalysis, not so much in an illustrative sense, but as a field of research, a possibility to investigate what inhabits the most internal and less visible part of experience.
In the works in the series I sought to construct ambiguous, open atmospheres, in which each element could suggest multiple levels of interpretation. I’m interested in the viewer not finding a single, closed meaning, but rather being able to enter the work in a personal way, recognizing something of their own: an emotion, a restlessness, a memory. In this sense, the unconscious for me is not just a theme, but a true language, a threshold through which the image can become a tool of knowledge, or at least a gateway to something deeper. With the Psiche series I just wanted to open this space, an invitation to look beyond the surface, toward those inner truths that often remain hidden, but yet continue to act within us.
The circus is also a recurring subject in your work. In The Circus Series (2024), the circus is a symbol of creativity, popular culture and wonder. The viewer, however, isn’t shown a traditional spectacle. Indeed, this time too, something seems to escape mere representation. The figures we see aren’t simple circus performers, they are elegant men in suits and ties, and they seem to come from a poetic and dreamy, yet familiar place, a metaphor for a life suspended between joy and melancholy. How did this project come about?
The Circus series was born from a desire to explore an imagery rooted in collective memory, that of the circus, while seeking to distance myself from its more traditional and recognizable representation. I’m primarily interested in the circus’s symbolic dimension: its wonder, creativity, sense of anticipation, but also that subtle melancholy that often accompanies spectacle, apparition, fiction. It’s a world with a dual nature, and precisely this ambivalence drove me to transform it into a more personal language. For this reason in the works in the series, the figures are not circus performers in the classical sense, but elegant, almost suspended characters, inhabiting a poetic and mental space rather than a narrative one. I was interested in evoking a human presence capable of suggesting both familiarity and estrangement, as if those characters were part of a memory, a dream or an interior scene. The theme of the threshold between reality and imagination returns in this project as well. The circus becomes, in fact, a metaphor for the human condition, for that constant tension between lightness and restlessness, joy and melancholy, mask and truth. In this sense, The Circus series was born as an emotional exploration even before a visual one, a way to give shape to a suspended universe, in which the marvelous coexists with something more intimate, fragile and profoundly human.
Mystical series (2024), instead, includes a series of works that address the theme of mysticism, a word derived from mystikós and meaning relating to mysteries, a topic found throughout art history through the use of symbols and visions linked to contemplation, timelessness, and altered states of consciousness that appear as an inexpressible mystery. In fact, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mysticism distanced itself from traditional religious iconography precisely to move closer to psychological introspection and the occult. Can you tell us about this project, and why you decided to tackle this theme?
The Mystical series was born from a very personal need. I’ve always been fascinated by the spiritual and mystical dimension, even its religious component, understood as a search for the truth and the need to give meaning to our existence. I’m not so much interested in “illustrating” the sacred or the mysterious, as in conveying that sense of threshold that sometimes arises internally, when something cannot be explained, but is perceived. My interest in altered states of consciousness also played a role in this journey, not as an escape, but as an opening. That is, those transitions in which perception changes, becomes more sensitive and seems to bring you closer to a spiritual dimension, as if the boundaries of ordinary reality were loosening. I’m interested in that type of experience because it challenges linear logic and allows a deeper, more intuitive level to emerge, often difficult to name. This is why I chose a language made of suspensions, silences, presences and essential signs. Images that don’t declare, but suggest, that don’t provide answers, but raise a question. In these works painting becomes a place of listening and contemplation, and the atmosphere, more than the narrative, is the tool with which I try to bring out what normally remains invisible.
Are there any artists who have influenced your work or continue to inspire it?
There are several artists who have influenced my work and who continue to inspire me. I’m especially interested in a way of constructing images capable of rendering the everyday enigmatic, symbolic and “mental.” Among my most important influences are Magritte and, more generally, a very “lucid” Surrealism, for its ability to shift reality in a flash and transform it into a visual question. At the same time, I’m drawn to the atmosphere of Metaphysical Art and Magical Realism. I think of de Chirico, but also of Casorati and Donghi, for their suspended spaces, slowed-down tempos, controlled clarity and that silence that renders presences almost timeless. I also feel connected to Domenico Gnoli, for his close-up vision and focus on detail, capable of making familiar things suddenly alienating. I was influenced by the climate of the French avant-garde of the 1920s, especially for its experimental freedom and the energy with which it reinvented visual language, in a continuous dialogue between image, imagination, and modernity. Alongside these references, the tradition of still life is also important to me: the idea that a common object, if isolated and charged with light and silence, can become emotional, intense, almost a place of reflection. And then there’s contemporary visual culture, with a certain pop energy, which enters the work as a collective memory and a short circuit. Ultimately, more than individual influences, they are atmospheres, structures and intuitions that I rework within my research to make them something personal.
What are your future projects?
My future plans are tied to my desire to continue exploring myself, pursuing an increasingly free and conscious pursuit. For me freedom is an essential condition of artistic creation: it’s what allows me to transcend the surface, to truly explore what I feel and transform it into an image. It’s in this space of exploration that I seek a truth, not an absolute or definitive one, but an authentic truth, one that concerns my way of seeing, living and expressing myself. It’s not an easy path, because you’re always in conflict and must constantly come to terms with yourself. Sometimes you let yourself be influenced by the context, by experiences, by what you go through. This is also why I feel an even stronger desire to get to the essence, to get ever closer to a form of expression that is sincere, essential, and profoundly mine.
There’s also a key issue I feel strongly about, even compared to what the market often demands today, a certain recognizable continuity, a coherent image, a “linear” path that makes a work immediately identifiable. I, on the other hand, realize I need to deviate, to move, to open side roads. When I feel I’ve found a direction, it’s natural for me to question it and explore its opposite, not to deny it, but to broaden my vision and remain faithful to complexity. Sometimes I wonder if this need to constantly experiment is a form of insecurity, or perhaps a limitation. I don’t have a definitive answer yet. But I know it’s also where I feel alive as an artist, because that’s where something real, something unpredictable, happens. My goal is to continue deepening my language, remaining open to experimentation and new stimuli, but without losing touch with the most intimate and authentic part of my work.