Daria Petrilli
BIOGRAPHY
Daria Petrilli, born in 1970, lives and works in Rome.
Graphic designer and publicist she creates illustrations and book covers. The Roman illustrator obtains numerous awards during her artistic career to the point of becoming a member of the Italian Association of Illustrators, which honors her with Awards. She has participated in numerous competitions: from Bologna to Tehran, from Turin to Lisbon.
Daria Petrilli’s works have been exhibited in national and international exhibitions. Her works are an ensemble between digital art and illustration. Daria creates unique pieces, mainly portraits of women, whose dreams and obsessions she captures.
Her art plates are also edited in fine art limited editions. Her ability to create harmonious ensembles has allowed her to design fashion collections and dress product lines for prestigious companies such as Shiseido and Miss Sixty.
Daria designs covers for major Italian publishing houses such as Einaudi, Rizzoli and Feltrinelli and has created for Bompiani the illustrations for “l’Atlante dei luoghi infestati,” written by Giulio D’Antona, of which she is co-author.
Daria Petrilli is a pop surrealist artist, she makes digital collages, which she reworks with graphic and pictorial interventions.
HISTORY
One is quick to fall in love with Daria Petrilli’s female figures. Surreal and ethereal, they have tapered fingers in the manner of Bronzino. They are fantastical creatures, wings and feathers. Wrapped in robes of conchi-glie and flowers. Portrayed in scenes with animals and plants, they merge with nature, in a metamorphosis that elevates them to the divine.
Dames in twentieth-century dresses, Victorian beauties who stand motionless, as if petrified. Women who move in dreamlike settings, in timeless spaces. Lonely, algid female figures, telling stories of loneliness. Their gaze is elsewhere, but when they raise their eyes, they pierce. Sometimes they double, in a play of mirrors that reveals the mute relationship between two women. Intimacy is concealed and protected by the jubilation of the background.
Many are Daria Petrilli’s women, one for each dream/passion and one for each obsession. Her protagonists, magnetic, invite beyond the mirror, to cross the threshold that separates dream from reality. Daria, alone, in front of the canvas, draws her imaginative.
PAINTING TECHNIQUE AND ARTISTIC CURRENT
Daria Petrilli is deliberately provocative: “I remodel photographs with digital painting interventions, I create a collage… a riot of Photoshop! I could have used traditional tools as well, but these illustrations were born out of personal fun and I made them without the vetoes of a commission and in the most immediate way. I hope to produce more, if I am not interrupted too often by what is outside the screen of my Mac!”.
Daria’s works cross boundaries, between reality and imagination, with an elegant and sublime language that plays on the “file rouge” of ambiguity. She is an artist immersed in the enchantment of the Italian Renaissance and the underground language of Pop Surrealism.
My cultural background has always been based on art studies since high school. Later I specialized with a master’s degree in illustration.
I started out as an illustrator and have always tried to find a unique and distinctive expression.
The inspiration came a decade ago, at the birth of my daughter Galatea. Not having much space in the house to be able to “do things” with traditional techniques, I began to “play” with the Mac. This digital technique has become MY art because it contemplates a myriad of possibilities creative that I had not previously considered because it is tied to the use of my manual skills, acquired through years of practice.
I have always been fascinated by many styles and artists, but the current I feel most akin to is surrealism, not surprisingly I have been mentioned among contemporary pop surrealist artists.
I am inspired not only by painting but also by the world of photography, film, fashion and architecture. I admire the past but also contemporary languages. I have a curious approach to every art form, which digital technique allows me to mix.
My creative process starts from the search for an original idea, an intuition that starts from the dreamlike retracing the thread of a dream that I try to remember when I wake up.
Once I choose what I want to represent, I look for many images that I mix and crop, changing their perspectives. When the composition takes shape I intervene with brushes and digital effects.
My contribution to the work is purely conceptual.
My technique is versatile but I could never use it without having an idea of would I have achieved the same result with a traditional technique. I always look for a textural and undefined result, following my stylistic signature of when using brushes with acrylic.
