Ashes Series - Evoking Presence Lost -Oil on fabric

Ashes is a series of oil paintings created on recycled fabric, born from a personal encounter with ecological loss. When I returned to my hometown in Salento after the pandemic, the once-verdant hills were reduced to a ghostly expanse of grey. The olive trees—ancient, gnarled, shaped by centuries of farmers’ hands and southern wind—stood lifeless, their green vitality extinguished by a fast-spreading epidemic. What had once been a landscape of resilience now resembled a cemetery of silent monuments.

The series captures the tension between permanence and decay. Each canvas is traversed by intricate networks of lines—some following Fibonacci principles, others collapsing into chaos—that form spectral impressions of nature. The viewer may glimpse horses, lizards, or imagined fragments of the vanished trees. These are not representations, but evocations of presence lost. The olive tree becomes a cipher: for time, for memory, for the quiet violence of disappearance.

Water becomes an invisible yet powerful layer within the work: as a symbol of life, memory, and erosion. It seeps through each composition metaphorically—hinting at what nourished these trees for generations, and what now washes their roots clean of history.

Ashes is not simply a lament, but a call to attention: a way of mourning what’s gone while honouring its trace in line, form, and texture.