I’m a visual artist, and my work flows between collage, drawing, and painting. I
move through fragments, scraps, reused materials—like someone gathering
pieces of memory to build, layer by layer, a silence that takes shape. I like to think I
work on the edge of language, even when it lingers close. I’m not interested in
illustrating the world—I want to listen to it. Listen to what it still whispers, to what
remains, to what insists on returning even without a name.
For me, painting is like writing. Every brushstroke is a wordless sentence. Each
layer, a silent rewrite. My works are born this way: in the space between movement
and stillness, between what appears and what fades, as if the surface were a
blank page where time doesn’t pass—it settles. Layer upon layer. Presence over
absence.
I've been working with oil paint on paper like someone revisiting memories. Like
someone trying to name what slips away. The images emerge from daily life, from
readings, from scraps, from leftover colors—but also from emptiness, silence, and
chance. Sometimes it’s the paper that leads me—its texture, its stains, its
accidents. So I draw directly with a brush, with charcoal, with conté. And I go,
without sketching, like someone listening with their hands.
That’s how I work: between absences and repetitions, between small traces that
stay and the constant risk of erasure. I believe there’s a narrative between one
image and the next. An intimate story. Maybe one without words. Maybe only
visible to those who stop and really look. My titles come last—when the image
finally tells me why it came, or when I see myself in it and recognize what was
already there. And through all of this, painting is my way of being in the world. It’s
where I find shelter—but also where I lay myself bare. Always both.
Memory in Motion
Justina D’Agostino