Marila Scartozzi - Sulla pelle dell'acqua

Marila Scartozzi (b. San Benedetto del Tronto, 1999), obtained a MFA in Painting in 2024 from the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice. In 2022, she was among the winners of the Tirana International Contemporary Art Festival. In 2024, she took part in the collaborative initiatives between the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice and the Albanian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale, and participated in the Fabbri Prize (Treviso). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation during 2024–2025.

At the core of her practice lies an investigation into relationships, subjectivity, and female desire. Through an introspective process, she constructs layered narratives in which everyday gestures become intimate traces, overlapping and converging into multiple personal dimensions.

In her paintings, the skin of the figures appears torn or burned, pierced by an intense light that renders bodies fragile and evanescent. Ink establishes the essential structure of the image, while oil thickens in zones of heightened description. The body becomes a site of tension, where exacerbated carnality intertwines with progressive transfiguration. Spirituality and visceral force chase one another in a circular duality, opening suspended imaginaries between passion, loss, ecstasy, and metamorphosis.

Unexpected and often ambiguous relationships emerge: backgrounds seep into the figures like atmospheres rather than landscapes, blurring the boundary between the real and the fantastic. Nature reclaims its space, growing over and alongside human ruins, mending a tear perpetuated over time. Skin, hair, hides, and canines become connective tissues linking the human, animal, and natural realms in a continuous process of regeneration—generating a fertile tension between fear and tenderness, familiarity and estrangement.