Artist Statement
In Lucilla Bellini’s work, reality dissolves and recomposes through layers of memory, dreams, and feminine identity. Her artistic practice merges analog and digital photography, experimental analog printing (lumen print, cyanolumen, wet cyanotype), polaroid manipulation, and AI-generated images, in a continuous exploration of nature’s beauty and the tension between organic and artificial.
Each work develops as a collage of overlapping layers, where dreams manifest visually as a fabric of “veils.” These layers overlap and dialogue with each other, suggesting a reality permeated by imagination, nostalgia, and awakened memory. The superimposition is not merely technical, but conceptual: each layer reflects a dimension of the feminine, a fragment of the subconscious, and a trace of what time threatens to erase.
At the foundation of Lucilla’s photographic research lies the desire to create images that belong to an ethereal, dreamlike, and profoundly surreal dimension. In these compositions, nostalgic elements settle, reminiscences of a personal and collective past. The photographs and digital works evoke suspensions and atmospheres that seem to float outside of time, leading the viewer into a liminal space between memory evocation and oneiric vision.
The entire research is based on a poetic tension toward the utopian balance between human being and nature. Interior and real landscapes blend together, witnessing the possibility – perhaps only imaginary – of a harmonious fusion between the individual and the natural environment. Each work suggests the urgency of rediscovering this connection, relying on the evocative power of the image and the delicacy of organic matter captured in photographic processes.
The experimental techniques – lumen print, cyano lumen, wet cyanotype – realized with natural elements, translate a material magic: they imprint an ephemeral trace of leaves, flowers, and pigments, evoking the organic, the nostalgic, and mnemonic awakening. Analog photography becomes a pretext for the rediscovery of memory and for the celebration of photographic alchemy.
Lucilla Bellini questions the boundary between the real and the unrealized: the connection between AI-generated images and those produced by the subconscious is central. The artificial does not oppose the organic, but amplifies its emotional resonances, giving form to dreams that merge with ancient reminiscences, constructing visual landscapes balanced between impersonified reality and oneiric dimension.
The manipulation of polaroids, with painting and cutouts, reinforces the theme of boundary-crossing: images recompose as fragments of memory, guardians of nostalgia and archetypal universe. The feminine figure emerges dreamlike and fragmented, keeper of an impalpable beauty and of a constant dialogue between nature, artifice, and introspection.
Bio
Lucilla Bellini was born in Florence in 1979.
Her passion for visual arts took shape during adolescence with drawing and later evolved through training at the International School – Academy of Visual Art and New Media in Florence. In parallel, she deepened her understanding of the relationship between image and society with a degree in Visual Anthropology.
Photography, from the beginning, attracted her to portraiture: her subjects, immersed in melancholic and cinematographic atmospheres, become epiphanies of suspended time where memory and beauty stratify in multiple veils.
Her images investigate the boundaries between real and unreal, drawing inspiration from literary, cinematic, and artistic universes like David Lynch, Haruki Murakami, Tim Walker, Man Ray, Botticelli, and Bosch. The skillful use of vintage clothing, abandoned locations, pictorial reminiscences, and insertions of artificial elements generates ethereal, dreamlike, and nostalgic scenarios, disciplines in which dreams unfold as stratifications of visual and meaning levels.
Having moved to Tenerife since 2015, her production integrates the natural element even more deeply as a symbol of purity, utopia, and the search for harmony between human beings and nature. Photography with natural light and strong interaction between model and environment evoke a fragile and precious balance, poetic and visionary.
The theme of boundary-crossing, fragmented images, and memory also runs through her mixed media works: collage, polaroid manipulation, overlays of experimental photographic techniques (lumen print, cyano lumen, wet cyanotype), and AI images give voice to a feminine universe in becoming, where each layer tells of nostalgia, a memory, or a transformation. The image, like memory, always appears “open,” crossed by cuts, residues, overlaps.
Some collages are part of the international anthology “Making the Cut Vol.1 – The world’s best collage artists” (BookBaby, Melbourne, 2017). She exhibits in Paris in both editions of “ImageNation,” in the group show “Ethereal: A Daily Poetry” and “Paris Photo Off.”
She works as a professional photographer and collaborates with slow fashion brands and entities that share her research: telling, through images, the fragile balance between dream and reality, between human and nature.
Since 2011, she has been a member of TAU VISUAL, the National Association of Italian Photographers.