Alice Capelli, 22, is a rising talent. She is about to graduate from Brera Academy of Fine Arts and she is eager to enter the artists’ world as a painter. Her works reflect a dreamlike and soft vision of eroticism and human sexuality resulting from a deep and authentic self-examination.
Tell us about yourself and your education.
I was born and raised in Milan in a very creative family: my great-grandfather was a talented painter and my dad inherited his passion and transmitted it to me afterward.
My dream as a little girl was to go to the academy of fine arts; in high school, I became keen on philosophy and aesthetics mainly thanks to my teacher. One of the things that interested me the most was art therapy as a teaching method.
When I enrolled in Brera school, I learned a lot from my professors: they are all valid artists and they encouraged me to never lose the idea that doing art should also be fun.
What inspires you and drives you to keep painting?
The main inspiration for me comes from sexuality. My parents have never seen it as a taboo, but they have always faced their nudity and eroticism with a natural and positive attitude.
In school, I started reading erotic stories and comics and shaped my own ideas around them.
I think that being true and honest about human sexuality and speaking emotionally about it might be a great opportunity for confrontation.
There should always be space for dialog between people, especially between males and females.
My womanhood is important and should be recognized in art as in everyday life.
This is a philosophical battle I intend to pursue and explore in my future career, something that women like Ambera Wellmann and Cecily Brown are representing.
What technique do you mostly use and why?
I use a mixed technique of pastels, acrylic paint, pigments and oil on canvas and paper.
I never add different materials in my works, I like to think the paint as the body and the soul of my art. I mostly use blue, red, white and orange gradients.
There are fewer and fewer painters and passionate people like me should fight to carry it forward — we have a sort of responsibility.
I don’t do figurative works anymore, I prefer abstraction: I consider it more complicated, less restricted. It is a mental process of composition and re-elaboration, a functional work that takes you to another dimension where every interpretation is possible.
Is there something you would like to change in today’s art business or in how young painters are seen by the public?
Today’s artistic world is very hard to analyze. Contemporary art is not valued in the right way, there has been a total separation between what is beautiful and what is likable.
Galleries and their managers are all oriented towards money profit instead of the real interest of the artist. There should be more encouragement to originality: not everything has already been done. We should ask for more productive freedom apart from pure business. Artists need to have a clear idea of their talent and capacities to effectively deliver their message.
We should travel more and be committed.
If you could choose one museum in the world for an exhibit of your works, which one would it be?
The Gagosian in New York.
It is an open space where I could finally work with a large canvas and I would be able to express a more visceral insight of sexuality. I always tell myself to make love to the entire surface available.
What do you have in mind for the future? Any new projects you would like to share?
I am developing the idea of creating an exhibit of installations about the five senses and their connection to eroticism and sexuality.
The base concept would be a sense of aroused freedom.
I also shoot a lot of photographs but they are not ready to be shown yet; I hope someday they will be. I surely want to stick to my vision of a oneiric dimension where the paint has the taste and scent of sexuality, something that raises more questions than answers and finally shows the great potential of eroticism which is intrinsic to life.
