The Inquiring Canvases of Sarah Bozzaotra

This article was originally published on Hue & Eye.

About Sarah Bozzaotra

Sarah Bozzaotra is a young Italian woman born and raised in Naples, Italy, and she will immediately confirm the controversial identity of her city. Naples’s suffering soul is opposite to the exuberant artistic aesthetic and lifestyle, and the nearby Vesuvio gives the final hint of this disruptive frame to all its inhabitants. Sarah completes her description, telling about her father, an artist, sculpture, set designer, and architect. Being always surrounded by art is indeed the main reason why she finally felt for art herself.

When asked what drove her to make art, she spontaneously answers this comes from the urge to tell something to someone outside herself. Her drawings and paintings are lucid yet reflective, filled with symbolic representations. Sarah draws every day, as a ritual to outburst her feelings. Sometimes her drawings will remain sketches others will turn out as proper paintings. Her only inner needs start the mechanism.

About Her Practice

As Sharah Bozzaotra approached art not that long ago, she feels as if she has everything yet to gain. Although she was previously asked by a magazine to create some illustrations, art took a while to become a serious option to her. Sarah tells us how the experience of St-art Workshops supported her in the art process allowing her to exhibit her art for the first time. While attending it in Amsterdam, she then created four canvases named after “Amsterdam Visions,” all connected one to the other through a common element.

Sarah defines herself as a nostalgic dreamer, inspired by memories and past events. As a proper observer, she has an attraction for daily facts and people’s lives around her. Being attracted and questioning details is how Sarah would like others to relate with her artworks — through an inquiring eye, observing and examining every area of the canvas, to gently enter her private world. It’s a delicate way to donate the access key to who feels interested in what she has to say.

Sarah Bozzaotra is an experimenter also when it comes to the choice of the technique. She mostly draws with all typical professional tools like wax, watercolors, charcoals, sometimes nail polish o beauty products, and again crayondìs and pens. For not a long time, she paints on canvas using oil, acrylics, and watercolors. Sometimes she happens to print the final piece onto aluminum supports to explore the result on different sizes and surfaces. Sarah feels engaged and moved by artists like Francesco Clemente, Ernesto Tatafiore, Julian Schnabel, and Frida Khalo. Let’s wish her to reach her aim of keeping communicating through her art, for this to become her full-time job.