Floating Thoughts
A series of mixed-media works hovering at the threshold between figuration and abstraction, where half-seen figures emerge from and dissolve back into colour, light and gesture.
In 2021, a serious health crisis in my family brought me face to face with the most fundamental questions.
Life and death. Presence and absence. What remains of a person when the defining lines of their form begin to blur.
Floating Thoughts was born from that confrontation.
The works in this series exist at the edge of recognition. Figures, like a woman in red, a pair of hands reaching toward each other, a solitary form in the landscape, emerge from dense colour fields and gestural passages, never fully resolved, never fully dissolved. They are always in the process of becoming or of disappearing.
This is intentional. What interested me was not the figure itself but the moment just before clarity, and the moment just after. The space where we project ourselves, our memories, our losses, our longings.
Each painting in this series rewards slowness. Step closer and the figure becomes more elusive. Step back and it coheres. The works are designed to move with the viewer, physically and emotionally, so that the experience of looking becomes a form of active imagining.
The titles speak of places and states: Marrakesh, Marine Cave, The Way Home, The Hug. They are not descriptions. They are invitations. An invitation to bring your own story to the painting, and to find it already there, waiting.
To live with a work from Floating Thoughts is to keep that quality of open attention present. A space in your home that asks you, every day, to look a little longer.
Antonella Quacchia's artistic creations originate from an emotional core driven by a fascinating perceptive capacity, which expresses a profound spiritual tension. Her works arise from natural movements, nurtured by gestures that delicately reveal the introspective impulse, becoming immersive matter.
— Fortunato D'Amico