“I use real lights and shadows, but what I expect from them is, being beyond human existence, to
be conductors from depth to surface. The latter, often finding its necessary place in the human
face, must live imperfect as the approximation of perfect vulnerability.”

Cetti Tumminia

BIOGRAPHY
Cetti Tumminia was born in Sassuolo (Modena) in 1977, she obtained a “Diploma of Master of Art”
in 1996 and a “Diploma in Graphic Design and Photography” in 1998.
She has always been interested in the arts, getting into acting at first, but she could recognise
herself only years later through her newly found passion for the pictorial language. For this reason,
her journey as a visual artist has turned into professional in recent years.
Since 2013, she has started her artistic research in the context of drawing and hyper-realistic
painting choosing graphite as a favourite technique and experimenting at the same time on different mediums with a variety of painting means. Since 2015, she has partaken in several collective exhibitions organized by both private galleries and public institutions across the whole Italian territory and she has earned national and international acknowledgement. Since 2018, she has dedicated herself exclusively to her artistic productions, proposing herself also as a portraitist.

ARTIST STATEMENT
“Introspection”
Can the intimate world, that of our obsessions and our desires, manifest into the visible world? My
artistic research, through ephemeral and delicate portraits of female figures with a fleeting gaze
and impervious soul spawns from this question.

These women are frozen in "non-places" that tickle our fancy, faces of ideal beauty that crave for
a desire for discovery and revelation.

Through a rigorous technique, from the study of chiaroscuro and meticulous strokes, I draw in the
effort of returning that shining intimacy, often smothered or hidden, that we have inside of us. The
naked skin is clear and conspicuous as much as what is kept in the shadows, sometimes erased
with a solid matter or simply remaining out of sight.

We examine these portraits and we are examined back, spotting that moment of evolution and
change where pain and rebirth chase each other finding a perfect balance between frailty and
strength, fear and awareness, light and shadow.

"Close your eyes and look, watch the world as if in a dream and let it watch you back"