ARTIST STATEMENT

The painting of Maria Paola Coda occupies the territory where matter becomes thought and emotion takes form. Her work explores the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, drawing inspiration from the ever-changing atmospheres of nature: the vibration of light, the texture of the air, the depth of a color that seems to contain time. In her canvases, the landscape is not represented but breathed, and the pictorial gesture transforms into a form of inner language.

Inspired by nature —its atmospheres, textures, the intelligence of light, and the depth of color— Coda translates into paint the essential rhythms of the organic world. Each layer, each glaze, each fissure of material reveals a silent dialogue with time. Nature is not a motif here, but a vital presence, a teacher of processes, transformation, and equilibrium. Her works seem to emerge from the same organic flow that governs life: accumulation, transformation, balance, and loss.

Her practice revolves around the concept of the sublime: that moment when the human confronts the infinite and the ungraspable, experiencing a mixture of awe, beauty, and vertigo. In her paintings, the tension between control and surrender, between order and chaos, gives rise to works that do not depict but evoke. They do not provide answers; they offer an interior experience, a poetic space where the viewer can pause and feel.

Coda’s creative process is slow, meditative, and material-driven. She works with pigments and layered glazes that accumulate to create surfaces that seem to breathe. Matter becomes memory, light becomes thought. Each work is a fragment of life suspended, a place where the visible and invisible reconcile.

The titles of her works, always prime numbers, extend this poetic inquiry. Chosen for their singularity and indivisible nature, these numbers exist in solitude within the mathematical order. Each number, like each painting, embodies a unique and unrepeatable emotional state—a resonance that cannot be reproduced.

In Maria Paola Coda’s pictorial universe, matter breathes, light becomes memory, color becomes inner language, and silence transforms into thought. Her paintings do not aim to explain the world but to offer a space to pause and experience it. Before each work, the viewer encounters an intimate, timeless experience, where the visible and the invisible are reconciled in a single, resonant gesture.