20.06.2025, attesa delle prime trame | Domenico Grenci

Bitumen, oil and charcoal on canvas

24 x 30 cm

2025

Unique piece

Signed and dated on the back

The core of Domenico Grenci's research within Questo silenzio intorno focuses on portraiture as an experience of duration and co-presence. For the first time, the artist abandons the use of images taken from magazines and photographic materials, which had constituted the basis of his previous work, to confront live portraiture directly.

The works originate from repeated posing sessions, in which the observed face manifests itself as an unstable presence, traversed by perceptual tensions and continuous transformations. Drawing is configured as an immediate gesture of the gaze, capable of retaining the instant without definitively fixing it, while the practice develops within a relational field in which observer and observed mutually influence each other over time.

The result is a body of works in which the figure emerges as a trace of an encounter rather than as an identity definition. The face is progressively constructed through a practice of prolonged observation that accentuates its fragile, unfinished and continuously renegotiated nature. The portrait thus becomes a form of attention: a device that does not capture the image, but holds it in its becoming.