10 Questions with Maurizio D'Andrea

Maurizio D’Andrea was born on January 2, 1967, in San Giorgio a Cremano, near Naples, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, in a place where the force of nature intertwines daily with that of culture, rooting in his body and in his artistic sensitivity a vivid, layered, and symbolic awareness.

The volcano taught him from the very beginning that what pulses underground, unseen yet powerful, resembles what moves within the depths of the psyche: an invisible energy capable of shaking and transforming. He graduated with honours in Geological Sciences, specialising in volcanology, but long before earning his degree, he was already immersed in another kind of exploration: that of the soul. Almost as an urgency rather than a choice, during his teenage years, he began to paint. His first inner landscapes emerged at the age of sixteen: spontaneous visions surfacing as fragments of the unconscious, which he translated onto canvas through a direct, epidermic gesture, using his hands as if in a primordial dialogue with matter. That immediate contact became his first grammar.

Over time, he expanded his expressive vocabulary, experimenting with every surface and object as possible extensions of an original impulse: brushes, spatulas, rollers, rags. His painting has never sought a definitive form, but rather an emotional truth. Passionate about psychology, alongside his scientific background, he cultivated the study of the great thinkers of the unconscious: Freud, Jung, and Lacan.

D’Andrea’s painting is rooted in informal abstraction, yet over time, he felt the need to move beyond it. In 2022, at the Accorsi Gallery in Turin, he founded the Radical Introversive Artistic Movement (MAIR), with the aim of bringing art back to its pulsating core: interiority. He does not paint to sell or to explain, but to provoke disorder, to generate visions, to ignite projections. He does not control the work: he lets it happen, as an unconscious event of which he merely becomes the medium.

He has had the privilege of exhibiting his works in many cities, from Rome to Tokyo, from Venice to New York, from Milan to Paris, passing through Madrid, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, London, and Zurich. Among the recognitions he has received, the Golden Lion at the International Triennial of Venice in 2024 marked a moment of great resonance, rewarding the radicality and originality of his research. Another unforgettable milestone came in 2025 at the Sorbonne University in Paris, which honoured his studies on Freud’s and Jung’s unconscious applied to art, highlighting the profound connection between theoretical reflection and pictorial practice that runs through all his work.

Today he lives in Alba, in Piedmont, where he has his studio, which he has named Orizzonti Impossibili (“Impossible Horizons”): a space that is both refuge and forge, where he continues to question the unknown, to cross the thresholds of the visible, to give form to what, apparently, is not there. For him, art remains, and perhaps always will be, a necessary journey into the heart of the invisible, through the fault lines of the unconscious, to give voice to what has always dwelled within us, silently.

www.dandreart.info | @maurizio_dandrea_artista

ARTIST STATEMENT

Maurizio D’Andrea’s research explores the unconscious as an active stage: the symbol does not represent, it acts. For him, the painting is not an image to be contemplated but a device that triggers processes, of resonance, of friction, of transformation, within the time of looking. Through material stratifications, abrasions, and glazes, he arranges signs and archetypal figures as acts, not as illustrations: what appears on the surface is the visible echo of an underground work, where gesture, error, and time sediment into fields of force. He investigates emptiness as a generative space: a reservoir of energy that does not coincide with absence but with the work’s availability to make things happen. In his vision, emptiness opens, suspends, defers: it creates interstices where the image can take shape and thought can breathe. Within this horizon, painting becomes a visual pharmakon: remedy and poison, cure and shock; a practice that disorders perceptual automatisms in order to reorganise them into a broader form of figural attention. Each painting thus configures itself as an event that occurs within the viewer, a threshold where seeing coincides with active imagination, and the image ceases to say “something about” to instead act something within us. Operationally, D’Andrea works through superimpositions and deferrals: he layers, erases, incises, leaves sediments; alternates densities and rarefactions, shifts of rhythm and visual silences; brings edges into tension, forces the axis, allows matter to resist. The sign, in his work, does not describe: it takes a stance. The archetype is not a predetermined figure but a field of possibilities that manifests through variations, returns, and metamorphoses. The figure arises where matter and gesture attune themselves in extended time, where the image is not concluded but held open. This posture is nourished by a dialogue with practices and thoughts he considers operative: active imagination (Jung) as method, the notion of pharmakon (from Plato to contemporary rereadings) as the fertile ambivalence of the visual, the phenomenology of matter and emptiness (Bachelard) as dynamics of becoming. He does not illustrate their theories: he enacts their forces. Thus, in his path, painting becomes a site of dramaturgy of the invisible, where image and psyche co-implicate each other in a play of appearances, withdrawals, and reactivations.

Esisto Dentro, Acrylic, 60X60 cm, 2024 © Maurizio D'Andrea

INTERVIEW

Let’s start from the basics. You grew up at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. How has that landscape, and its powerful natural energy, influenced your artistic vision?

I grew up in a place where the earth breathes. Vesuvius is not just a mountain; it is a presence, a kind of telluric consciousness that teaches you, from childhood, that everything solid can suddenly change its form. That volcano carved into me the idea that matter is never stable, that every equilibrium is temporary. This geological gaze upon the world, this awareness of reality as an ongoing process of transformation, became the foundation of my art. Every painting, for me, is a magma chamber where inner eruptions are prepared. I do not paint external landscapes; I paint subterranean tensions, forces seeking a passage.

You first studied geology and volcanology. How do you see the connection between that scientific training and your later journey into painting and psychology?

Geology taught me to read depth, not surface. Studying the Earth’s layers is, in truth, very similar to studying those of the psyche. Every rock, every fracture, every lava flow tells of invisible processes, of time sedimented. Later, when I encountered depth psychology, I recognised in Jung and Freud that same science: the work on the unconscious is an analysis of strata, of forces, of symbolic shifts. Painting, for me, became the synthesis of those two worlds, the visible and the subterranean, where the canvas behaves like a geological section of the soul.

Istinti Repressi, Acrylic, 60X60 cm, 2024 © Maurizio D'Andrea

What led you to start painting as a teenager, and how did that early impulse evolve into your mature artistic language?

At first, it was an urgency rather than a choice. I did not yet know what “art” was, but I felt the need to give form to something unspeakable. Painting was like breathing underwater, a way to survive pressure. Over time, that impulse transformed into a conscious research, into a symbolic grammar. Today, I don’t paint to express myself; I paint to let something happen through me. The work is no longer my voice, but a voice that passes through me.

Your practice deeply engages with the unconscious. How do you approach painting as a dialogue with what lies beneath awareness?

The unconscious is not, for me, an archive of contents, but a stage where forces act. When I paint, I’m not seeking images; I’m seeking psychic events. Colour, matter, gesture: they become forms of evocation rather than representation. The canvas is a space where the invisible takes shape, reveals itself, and then vanishes again. To paint means to welcome the unknown, to engage in a dialogue with mystery. It is an act of trust toward what inhabits me.

You often speak of art as an “event” rather than an image. What do you mean by that?

An image, in the traditional sense, is something to look at; an event is something that happens. I believe art should not simply represent the world, but regenerate it. When I say “event,” I mean an inner happening, a symbolic transformation involving both the viewer and the creator. The work is not an object, but an encounter, a field of forces where something, inside the artist or the spectator, moves, opens, transforms.

Can you describe your process in the studio? How does a painting begin, change, or resist your control?

My process begins in silence. I don’t search for an image, I search for a state. Sometimes I spend days just looking at the blank canvas, listening to the tension that grows between me and that surface. Then, a gesture, a stain, an error becomes the point of departure. From there, the painting evolves like an autonomous organism: it guides me, resists me, contradicts me. I don’t control it; I accompany it. It’s a continuous dialogue between chaos and form, between desire and renunciation.

What inspired you to found the Radical Introversive Artistic Movement (MAIR), and what does “introversive” mean in this context?

MAIR was born as a poetic act of resistance. In a time dominated by exposure and externality, I felt the need to reclaim depth. “Introversive” does not mean closed; it means oriented inward, returning to the origin of the image, to its archetypal force. The MAIR doesn’t seek effect, but essence; it doesn’t communicate to be understood, but to awaken. It is a form of art that is not sold, but lived.

You’ve described emptiness as a generative space rather than an absence. How does this concept shape your work?

The void is my horizon of meaning. It is not a lack, but a possibility. It is the space where the image is not yet, but may become. Every work is born from the void, from silence, from waiting. In an age that fears nothingness, I see it as a creative womb, the place where forms are prepared, where thought dissolves and vision begins. The void is, in truth, the highest form of presence.

Frammenti di Energia 1, Acrylic, 60X60 cm, 2025 © Maurizio D'Andrea

Frammenti di Energia 2, Acrylic, 60X60 cm, 2025 © Maurizio D'Andrea

How do you hope viewers engage with your paintings? And what kind of inner experience do you want to provoke or awaken?

I don’t aim to “communicate” a message, but to activate an experience. I want the viewer to feel moved, not informed, to sense a disturbance, a suspension, a calling. If the work can create an inner space, a symbolic echo, then it has truly happened. I believe that true art doesn’t convince; it moves. It doesn’t explain; it generates. The work lives only when someone inhabits it.

Lastly, what are you currently exploring in your studio at Orizzonti Impossibili, and what new directions do you see your research taking?

I’m working on what I call Dramaturgies of the Invisible: pictorial forms that extend beyond two dimensions into performative, sonic, and experiential fields. The idea is to make painting happen in space, as a symbolic event that engages body, sound, light, and word. At the same time, I’m deepening the connection between art and depth psychology, seeking a new grammar of the unconscious image, not representational, but active, transformative. Orizzonti Impossibili is not merely a studio; it’s a psychic laboratory, a place where the work happens, and in happening, transforms us.

Artist’s Talk

Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.

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