It’s easy to fall in love with Daria Petrilli’s young ladies. They are surreal, ethereal, unattainable. They feature hairstyles of the twentieth century and dresses of the past. They dream, sprawled out on welcoming petals. Their eyes are often low. The have long pointed fingers like in a Bronzino painting. If they look at you they seem to beg complicity. Otherwise they avoid confrontation. Just as Raphael’s cherubs, they are familiar with docile birds: “Birds – says the artist – seem to convey a sense of primordial concern, so they are often found in my work “. So flamingos and parrots, robins and birds, even if they are not worthy of Paradise, they are at least worth Purgatory; flocks of geese, stiff kingfishers who seem to be able to sublimate the limits that the technique requires of the imagination of the artist. “It’s all digital photographs with touch-up interventions of painting, always digital… a blaze of Photoshop. I could have also used traditional instruments, but these illustrations were created for personal fun and I have done them with no clients’ vetoes and as quickly as possible. I hope to produce some more, if I am not interrupted too often by what is outside of a Mac’s screen”. Come on, Daria, BARNUM expects many more.
