From My Studio to the MUST Museum: Exhibiting Alongside Titian and Bernini

There's a particular kind of vertigo that comes from standing in a 16th-century building, surrounded by stone vaults that have outlasted empires, and finding your own painting hanging just a few rooms away from a Titian.

That was my week in Lecce.

Two of my paintings were selected for IMAGO III, the third chapter of a contemporary exhibition curated by Andrea Tapparini of Darte Studio, held at the MUST Museum — Lecce's historic city museum. Twelve artists, from Brazil to the United States to Spain, brought together under one roof to explore the idea of the image: what it holds, what it transforms into, what survives translation across cultures and materials.

What I didn't expect was the dialogue happening one floor over. At the very same time, the MUST was hosting Tesori Nascosti della Galleria Borghese — hidden treasures from one of Rome's great collections, spanning Titian to Bernini. Walking from that wing into ours felt less like moving between two separate shows and more like watching one long conversation continue across five centuries: the same questions about light, the human figure, and what a painted surface can hold, asked in completely different languages.

My own work sits firmly in the second language. I don't paint landscapes as records of a place — I paint what a place leaves behind in memory. Colour does most of the emotional work: in my Celestial Bloom series, a sky dissolves from indigo into rose, built up in layers of acrylic until the texture itself catches light differently depending on where you stand in the room. Seeing it there, in that particular stone-walled gallery, with centuries-old portraits just around the corner — I understood something about my own work that I hadn't fully put into words before. Landscape, even an invented or emotional one, is never neutral. It carries the same weight a 17th-century portrait does: memory, stillness, sometimes grief, sometimes joy.

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Lecce itself made the whole experience richer — the warm stone architecture, the baroque facades, a city that seems to take its own art history for granted in the best possible way. It's hard not to be affected by a place where history isn't behind glass, it's just outside your front door.

I'm deeply grateful to Andrea Tapparini and the whole Darte Studio team for the invitation, to the MUST Museum for the space, and to Lecce for the welcome. This is the kind of exhibition that stays with you long after you've packed up and flown home — not because of the size of the audience, but because of what it clarified about my own work.

Thank you, Lecce.