Maria Paola Coda: Painting the Human Condition

From the outset, Maria Paola Coda’s artworks appear as hatchings. They are layer upon layer of colour and brushstrokes to an egg-shell effect. But what seem to be soft and delicate etchings are in actual fact much more than that. They seeped in emotion, in mental states, moods, thoughts and experiences. With each stroke, each colour, each line, there is a new message of the human condition imbued in Coda’s work. 

In her paintings, Coda postulates the metaphysics of life: identity, time and space. Her work is a permanent search into the beauty that hides in the state of one’s mind. Her works are everything, and nothing. They are unique to each viewer, holding whatever it is one brings to each glimpse: the mood, the emotion or the thought process that rests in the viewer. 

Coda herself (b. 1981, Italy) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Florence, and since 2006 has lived and worked in Girona, Spain. Her personal exhibitions began in 2004 in her native country (the same year she was awarded a special mention at the International Content of Contemporary Art of Positano), and since then her works have been exhibited in Girona, New York, Barcelona, Oursense and Florence. 

For those looking to learn more about Coda’s work, we got the chance to sit down with the artist to ask her about her practice. For those looking to acquire her work, she is represented by Villa del Arte Galleries.

Barnebys: There is a blank canvas before you. How do you begin? Have you done preparatory sketches, or is your work all about the present moment? 

Maria Paola Coda: I always begin my work by choosing an image or an object that inspires or attracts me with its colours, vibration or texture. I examine it, decipher the different tones and depth, and from there I transfer it to the canvas, deciding on the chromatic composition, the weight of the colours and the vanishing point.

Your works are acrylic on canvas. What is it about these media that you like? 

I like acrylic because it allows me to work with multiple layers of paint with relative speed as it dries quickly. Furthermore, the colours I use are made by me: I mix pigments with an acrylic base. This type of colour is much more intense and vibrant than commercial acrylics.

When do you best like to work? Is there a certain day, a certain time? Or does inspiration strike after a certain moment, mood or experience? I really like to paint in the morning, when there is good light.

You search for the beauty hiding in the state of mind. What does beauty look like to you? 

Beauty is a strange concept because it has several components. It has a very personal part, which is rooted in the background of each individual, their experiences or traumas.

But it also has a universal component, something that we all share even with nature itself, and this is the part that attracts us the most because it is something that goes beyond shape or colour, it is something vibratory and energetic. It’s that vibration that makes you cry looking or listening to something without a rational reason.

Beauty in the concept of the sublime is what interests me and what I am looking for.

There is a certain tension to your work, but, at the same time, it is very balanced, almost calming. How do you create this push and pull? 

This pushing and pulling are what I want to create, it is a movement that is born of something static, it is energy and life. Malevich said that it is the artist's duty to be like God and God does not replicate but rather creates and creating is not only inventing new forms never seen before, it is giving life and life is vibration.

My creative medium is colour and the alchemy that is formed by superimposing the layers of colour is what creates this energy. Then the tension or balance is determined by the viewer.

What is it you hope to bring to your viewers? What would you like audiences to think about as they walk away from your work?  

I would like the viewer to think about himself/herself. That my work may push him or her towards introspection, open the door to his or her deepest being.

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