Simone Maestra

Simone Maestra graduated from the School of Photography and Visual Arts (ISFAV), Padova, Italy, in 1996. He has collaborated with Agency Franca Speranza/Olycom and BlobCG in Milan and assisted photographers Daniele & Iango, Jean Baptiste Mondino, and Tommaso Sartori in Paris. In 2007, Maestra moved to Spain, where he lives and works. In 2016, he began painting, self-taught. Maestra’s artistic activity is inextricably linked to his photographic career. His analog practice is conceived around a definitive shot, from which a fundamental human presence and narrative structure emerges. The photos he takes or encounters offer a starting point for his paintings. He is drawn to the private expressions and poses of ordinary people, which he relates with quick strokes of color, borrowing from the immediacy inherent in photography. 

Maestra often works on very small format canvases which, when observed in groupings, resemble an endless scrolling screen. These more intimate works are juxtaposed with larger-scale works, such as a recent series on bullfighting, a world known to the artist exclusively through the collective imagination and Picasso's lessons. Another important facet of his practice are the artist books he creates, visual diaries composed of impressions of imaginary and non-imaginary journeys, which combine and juxtapose paintings and found images. 

Maestra primarily works in series, painting multiple canvases at the same time. The two bodies of work shown below differ in scale and subject. The small bird portraits are maquettes for a larger body of work, composed on 60 x 60 cm canvases featuring tightly cropped birds posed on a disembodied hand. The fish paintings began as an experiment wherein the artist used actual fish to create a stencil on the paper, and worked around the silhouette to draw out and reveal prominent features such as the metallic flashes and pops of bright colour that are characteristics of these pelagic.