THE PR/JECT
"Chi bello vo' parè nu poco adda patè."
Whoever wants to look beautiful must suffer a little. — Neapolitan proverb
Growing up in Napoli, beauty — and the act of making oneself beautiful — has always carried within it an implicit understanding of pain. Not beauty as effortless grace, but beauty as something earned, endured, negotiated with the body and life.
After all these years focusing my work on the human body, its representation, the thorn sense of beauty, I have come to understand — especially while working on my portraits and sharing them on social media — that my creative act has only one real, honest, genuine purpose, without presumption and without malice: to desecrate the vanity that lives inside each one of us.
"The truth is that beauty exists beyond the ordinary." — D. Barra
DIS/verse is a research and experimental project that fractures the conventional. A multimedia dimension where art glitches beyond boundaries. The familiar is distorted. The atypical is unleashed.
Everything here circles the same wound: the relationship between beauty and the human body, its depictions, its alterations, and our deeply compromised sense of what aesthetics are allowed to be. Each project in the DIS/verse cuts into a different layer of that wound — through glitch, through AI, through paint and tape and the residue of whatever medium refuses to behave.
This is also a search. Not for a new standard — for the opposite of standards. For what beauty looks like when it isn't trying to be approved. The new, the complex, the unexpected, the ambiguous, the arousing. These are not aesthetic preferences. They are demands.
This is a counternarrative. Against toxic ideals. Against the aesthetics of compliance. DIS/verse advocates for self-awareness without apology, self-respect without negotiation, and an understanding of beauty that doesn't flinch at what it finds.
Pixels and pigments. The possible is the only constant.