Giulia Occorsio acts. Bare feet and a mask covering the face. Giulia Occorsio plays herself, moves with suspended steps, dances. It is therefore as spectators that we approach his work, immediately sensing the thread of a narrative of ancient origins writhing beneath the calm waters. In fact, the artist draws his inspiration from classicism: evoked by the use of stone and allusive titles and experienced in its mythological and narrative component. What is a myth? A story. Vernant explains to us: “the myth presents itself in the form of a tale that came from the dawn of time and which already existed before any narrator began to tell it.”

Similarly, Occorsio conceives art, and it is in this situation that the value of his artistic work is identified, a drop in the ocean of human narration. The fingers, the chisel, the arms of the artist become the bards of antiquity, and sing his personal mythology, revised and filtered through the all-encompassing presence of the artistic ego. Sculpture is movement, vitality, and perhaps for this reason a suitable host to force a part of Occorsio's truths into the transience of matter. Giulia Occorsio's art has its roots in the flesh: it is an intimate, private journey that plays on different levels without ever revealing themselves completely, in an alternation of truths revealed immediately after absolutely denied. It is an ambivalent, dual art, which affirms and withdraws, confused, in continuous research, and for this reason, sincere.

The formal expression is entangled in the ambiguity of the figuration, while the thematic reflection finds its place and shelter in the myth as a personal narrative. But not everything is revealable and the transposition of interiority requires a barrier, a mask as a sweetener of nudity. Here the theater takes on the compact and positive expression of operation in the artist, the scenic gesture becomes mouldable material, the lines are embodied in the marble, the hexameters dissolve in the flakes of the stone. The circle closes, the story searches for itself, the volatile and variable form of the myth (similar to the silent stone faced with the multiplicity of interpretations?) finds life in extension, its innards in matter: poetry.

Claudia Bonandrini

“…ma tu dimmi: come e quando incontrasti la realtà?”

(Giulia Occorsio, “Il filosofo ed il poeta”)

Alessandria  6 dicembre 2011

The usual essential reorganization, dedicated to research done with various materials, leads the artist Giulia Occorsio to enhance the objective cornerstones of the poetic and revisited world of dreams. In view of the colors and the summary methods with which the painter establishes the intention and the reactive metamorphosis of the sign, all the existential aspects are summarized in concrete synthesis, from which silent conditioning, the movement is placed in relation with the facts from which She was able to draw inspiration and, for whose intimate vision, the evocative support of mimesis, gives charm to the coherent and systematic definition of the elements. A structure rich in love and peace that participates in the human condition of suffering and, in the time of the universal idyll, experienced by senses of attention aimed at the passing of the unique and spiritually lived dream, in the eloquent serenity of the tones.

Flavio De Gregorio

2018

From painting to sculpture, from graphics to digital experiments, Giulia Occorsio's creative path is characterized by an enveloping sign, which in the sinuosity of the development creates and undoes each subject: describing it not in a complete form but according to a personal grammar of mutability. Giulia Occorsio is fascinated by the movement of things, by transformation, by life iin progress she knows well that what is today was not yesterday nor will it be tomorrow. For this reason his works escape precise figurative classifications, presenting themselves rather as vital and therefore unstable forms: eager to project themselves outside the constraints of any perimeter. They are works that live on both sides of the support, capable of appropriating the space around them, because they invent a new perspective every time, mimic new depths, deceiving the eye which will never find a fixed point. It is the invitation to investigate the space around, to ask questions, to pursue answers.

An investigation into the history of art is not foreign to Giulia Occorsio's inventive complex: a certain idea of ​​Futurism is evident in the search for movement which in these works goes hand in hand with the Optical, with kinetic instances, all favored by a controlled use of technology whose coldness, however, is transcended, rather charging it with dramatic tension of feeling, of nostalgia, as befits an informed and sensitive artist. and sensitive. The titles of many works are proof of this (Finand dell’infanzia. Esasperazionand:  La coscienza), whose plot reveals a remarkable interpretative ability. Here then the artist's entire production takes the form of a large contemporary fresco in which idea and subject.; technique and emotion are concentrated in the small space of the painting which, in reality, is a large door open to unexplored vastness, towards which we are invited to look.

Mimmo Di Benedetto

Monza 24 maggio 2008

Space and Story

There is a beautiful phrase by Hegel, at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the chapter dedicated to Sensitive Certainty, that is, to the certainty of sensation, that form of knowledge which claims to be immediate, and which claims that its simple immediacy is the truth.

Well, Hegel says that "much more is at stake" even in this form of knowledge, and in the so-called "pure being" which would constitute its essence. “In fact - says the great philosopher - a real sensible certainty is not only this pure immediacy, but it is also a game that takes place alongside it, an example of it” (Phenomenologia dello Spirito, Bompiani, p. 171).

Stunning image! Any claimed simplicity and univocality of any sensitive experience is ruined. Every experience, every feeling is mediation. As if to say that consciousness always implies a reflection, a feeling of feeling, its doubling in self-reflection: doubling between the living flow of experience, on the one hand, and the warning of this flow, on the other. For this reason, says Hegel, consciousness is never immediate, but is always a work between itself, the other than itself and itself again, a continuous coming and going outside and inside itself, creating and recreating itself. This is why human life, as it happens, is represented. This is its specific essence. Man is that animal which, while he lives, talks about himself, symbolizes himself and things and himself in things. Human existence always takes place also in the story that man tells of himself, as in a mirror. These are the philosophical suggestions suggested to me by the first, short, telephone conversation with Giulia Occorsio. Giulia told me, at a certain point in the conversation: "... I'm not an artist, I'm someone who tells stories...".

I was struck by the reference to the story that the artist gave when talking about his work. It sounded to me as if it were an explicit, although perhaps unconscious, allusion to that tireless work of consciousness which, at the very moment it perceives, also weaves the plot of its own narrative. Giulia herself told me that her art 'seems' naive, and I found these words intriguing, in light of Hegel's reflection mentioned above: it makes you want to dig behind that 'seems'. Giulia's work shapes figures so crystalline in their figurative determination that they offer the sensation a familiar field, immediately recognizable and accessible. In front of his canvases the eye fills with familiar scenes and objects.

But what is the game that takes place alongside this 'simple' representation? Meanwhile, there is a technical expedient that can escape even the most attentive eye at the time: the space that Giulia stages is never an optical space, but is an 'haptic' space (from the Greek aptomai, which means I touch). It is a space, that is, in which the eye passes from one contour to another, from one area to another, as if touching the surface. It is the prevalence of cold colors and the marking of the lines that create this space in which everything is touched by the gaze, where tactility is delegated to sight, it becomes a function of the eye.

Let's take, for example, the beautiful Forse un Mattino, a painting accompanied by Montale's stupendous verses, from which it borrows the beginning, as its title. Despite the presence of the lake in the foreground, the house in the background and its doubling in the reflection in the water, the upper part of the painting prevails in perception, almost framing and giving its imprint to the rest. In this part the sinuous lines of the mountains and the sky cover a single surface, with minimal differences in depth. This is precisely the space of Montale's astonishing metaphor: "an air of glass". Glass air cannot be penetrated or breathed. It is suspended matter. Like a curtain, it can open or close a landscape, reveal or veil something. Precisely for this reason only she can allow the truth to 'happen', for a moment, like a secret just revealed and immediately hidden again. Giulia's painting reaches this moment of suspension because she knows how to draw, making it perceptible to the senses through lines and colours, the space of a revelation which, in itself, is not perceptible to the senses.

But, and here we are at the heart of the matter, the place of a revelation, the still and suspended space that Giulia knows how to paint, is always also a time, a moment removed from the chronological flow of our daily habits. This is why revelation, any revelation, is a disorientation, an estrangement, a bewilderment. For this reason the artist, every artist, arrives at the threshold of another world, at the offshoots of Nothingness. There is a word coined by the great French philosopher Deleuze to indicate the experience of losing one's borders, of being uprooted from one's 'country': deterritorialization. But the artist, every artist, returns from the extreme lands to which he reaches, bringing with him the traces of what he has seen. And he lives in his country again, as a foreigner. Every deterritorialization entails a new reterritorialization. And these are precisely the two poles of Giulia Occorsio's art.

Estrangement, loss, the proximity of vanishing always inhabit his images, which at first sight are so simple. They can be felt in that sort of excess presence of the physical landscape that inhabits many canvases. The mute physicality of matter is present as a real, inevitable and inaccessible fact, a sort of Kantian 'thing in itself', irreducible to the interpretative categories of man. But Giulia puts us face to face with the paradox of a 'thing in itself' that is more present to the senses than common space-time objects of usual sensorial experience. Think of the attractive power of the Cliffs of Moher, where the stone seems to summarize in itself all the gravitational force of the planet, all the attractive capacity of an energy that has become mass. As if the thoughts, desires, sighs, words and tears of all humanity had met there, to become a small piece of the body of the world. And it is Giulia's strong sinuous brushstrokes that materialize the matter protruding from the background as pure silent being. Or think of the steep verticality of the brushstrokes of the Glacier, or of the snow of Escape from Kabul or of the rock, pure protrusion of material fullness from the indistinctness of sea and sky, of the work Untitled: pieces of being that arise from nothing.

And Giulia knows how to repeat, in her canvases, the originality of the amazement and anguish that struck man when faced with the silent scenario of being, the painful enchantment of the moment in which the question of the meaning of existence arises. Heidegger said that it is the excess of what comes into existence that gives rise to the philosophical question par excellence, the question about the being of things. In fact, it is the excess of presence that creates mute disorientation and bewilderment. The artist is the one who returns from the extreme reaches of that confusion to 'tell' other men about his vision. So does Giulia. But she talks to us about disorientation, always recreating the country; it tells us about deterritorialization, always reconstructing the territory. During a meeting he told me that he didn't understand the meaning of the lines, so present and insistent, in his work. “I have this obsession with lines,” were his words. It is true. The lines are strong and seem to affect the space. But I like to think of the verb incise in its double Latin meaning: as composed of in più cado, and as composed of in plus caedo. In the first case it means falling inside, in the second cutting inside, carving. Giulia's lines fall into the space to carve it, cutting out, from the space of loss, a new space that once again welcomes, encloses, includes. Thus deterritorialization and reterritorialization, uprooting and rediscovery of the roots, disorientation and return to the country, are the two poles of the game, to take up Hegel's image, which takes place alongside the 'simple' figures of Giulia. And this happens because her art is a female story. It is the feminine principle of the soul that knows how to gather after dispersion, enclose after trespassing. The insistence of the lines, their repetition, reconstruct the frame capable of containing even the subtlest yearning, the most heartfelt nostalgia. And there is a work in which Giulia stages, perhaps without knowing it, the feminine. This is Mont Saint Michel.

The small cathedral that the artist says is 'enclosed in the fist of God', looks like a heart in a walnut shell, like a treasure kept in a treasure chest, always safe, despite knowing the cyclical overwhelm of the tides. Recollection and custody seem to be the continuous tension that runs through Giulia's work, like a thread that runs through all her works. It is something that is always in progress, rather than something accomplished. But life teaches us that there is tension only where equal and opposing forces come into play: the urge to enclose is all the stronger the stronger the painful but irresistible call of trespassing. Giulia's art captures on canvas the restlessness of life, of that life, subtle but impetuous, that flows in the veins of the soul.

2008 Pittura – Punto Arte, Via Bergamo 2/C Monza

Patrizia Crippa

2013

Percezioni allucinatorie

Giulia Occorsio's sensitive gaze moves us through the improvisation of visual reinterpretations on the level of pure aesthetics. The immediate chromatism creates a third dimension, that terrain vague which lies between the eternal and the transitory. The feelings, the artist's starting points, with a voluntary leap, in a propulsive impetus, manage to arrive at a solution, at the true purpose. The astonishing progress of digital technique is capable with photo-linguistic audacity of making painting converge with photography, creating a new vocabulary where pictorial gestures remain marginalized. The eye works in harmony with the optical lens, which captures the material necessary for research and allows the artist to navigate the reality that surrounds her. Giulia Occorsio's capacity for visual abstraction travels hand in hand with the complex speed of signs, enhancing the technological aspect of the work, made up of infinite and evident passages in every corner of its path, where nothing is taken for granted. In the work Inquietudine we remain poised between the image and its absence, the artist investigates banality in a continuous flow of visions clashing face to face with the hallucinatory perception of the world. Glimmers of figures, fragments of projections chase each other in a pre-established scenic space, determining voids and concentrations. Pictorial illusion where the final underground surrender is a metaphor of transgression and subtle rebellion. The slow reawakening of light and the universe, an antithetical combination of space and time that imprisons the eternal present, universality filtered by light punctuated by darkness that dispenses flashes destined to express pathos and movement. Digital art that goes beyond manual and technological ability, photographic deconstruction that with computerized processing expresses disorder, contemporary chaos, works from which a purity without deception transpires, the broad and dizzying gaze of the author shines through. Images between the surreal and the futuristic in the work Et notre mouvement, alienation of profound black and red deformations, Giulia Occorsio's need to barricade herself within her creativity to escape dark dreams and threatening realities. Dark attraction, exciting search in an inextricable tangle of apparitions and sensations, of flashes and precipices. The titles given to the works imply the secular and the spiritual, the revealed and the mysterious, oscillating on the different registers of the suspended intimacies of memory. Painting and photography which, by intensifying and overlapping, merge into an increasingly enveloping embrace. Elusive evocations which, in support of the delicate conceptual sphere, do not allow themselves to be ensnared by compositional virtuosity. The dynamics of the contents accentuates the tension through a sometimes acidic and corrosive chromaticism. The spectacular nature of the image brings out the secret of his poetic soul, no display of technical virtuosity but only the desire to manipulate a transitory reality to bend it to his own gaze, freeing it from its own superficiality.

Maria De Michele

Preganziol 6 Settembre 2014

The fundamental subject of his artistic research is humanity in the broad sense, in which man is not seen only as a physical element but above all as a mental, sensorial and emotional element. A vast research that overflows from realistic to surreal representation, or, to a mixture of both, in this way, the subject escapes from reality to sometimes become symbolic. She covers the work with subtle irony which is interpreted as an element of downplaying the world (i.e. the image) a work which is also enhanced by a theatrical dimension of the image itself. Her propensity for sculpture has meant that the work catalyzes a strong sign dimension that pervades the entire painting, this sign that comes from having studied sculpture, practiced shorthand for a long time and, last but not least, computer art. A symbolic dimension that also led her to the creation of works through computer art, reaching excellent levels not only aesthetically but above all interior and reflective.

2014 Painting and Digital Graphics – Galleria Elle, Preganziol Treviso

Silvio Perin

Perhaps, upon closer inspection, the interpretative key to Giulia Occorsio's personality may consist in what appears to us as a sort of poetic and existential declaration that the artist says in two verses of one of her poems: "it is even more difficult/ it is the gift of simplicity”.

By focusing on these two verses, speaking of her poetry, we have, however, also traced the profile of the Occorsio-artist, since in her personality it is not possible to distinguish - except in the peculiarity of specific manifestations - the poetess from the artist, being the profile overall of his creative intervention, motivated and presided over by a profound awareness of the importance of content, that is, by the weight and responsibility of building certainly not a universe of pure forms, but an organic communication process that allows for the activation of a fertile exchange with the user , not with the intention of transmitting knowledge ex cathedra, but in the need - and the theme of simplicity returns - to be able to count on stable and incontrovertible structures on which to support the edifice of psychological and cultural exchange.

Occorsio's artistic production offers itself as a productive manifestation that escapes a constrictive perimeter within a specific and determined stylistic scope, directing itself, rather, towards an open experimentation and suggestively available to the discovery of new worlds and creative opportunities, leaving room for the flourishing of a corporeity of image in which the gesture that creates the image needs to perceive as the only and indefectible normative prescription, obedience to the awareness of conscience, which cannot be identifiable in the guiding word of "simplicity".

Rosario Pinto

Sinuous and dynamic in a continuous and perpetual motion, this is how the works of the painter Giulia Occorsio appear, a multifaceted artist who loves to wander and experiment with multiple pictorial techniques and always tries her hand at different expressions and compositional solutions with the same skill and artistic ability. Figures, landscapes, empirical buildings and dreamy backgrounds are the protagonists of his artistic journey and are harmoniously accompanied by the chromatic shades of a rich and lively palette. Fantasy, pure creativity and inspiration from reality are the guidelines of his creations in which you can "breathe" the poetry and gracefulness of his thoughts.

Exstraterrestrials, metaphysical silhouettes and vortices of colors with an expressionist flavor follow one another with speed and intensity in the space and surfaces of the painting. Human feelings such as pain, happiness, faith, the intensity of unique moments such as motherhood are represented with equal passion. The dimension of the dream belongs to her and is strong and dominant in numerous works in which her thoughts seem to get lost and evanescent but also science, with its hidden geometries and its designs and patterns dictated by nature, offers the artist a reason to inspiration. Thanks to it, the artist can try his hand at dynamic compositions just as the cosmos is the object of creative suggestions which translate into galactic fluctuations and almost lunar, indistinct and anthropomorphic "presences", into spirals and vortices of light and energy in a " chaos” of fighters from distant planets. The same originality and creative intensity, which manifests itself in painting, emerges with equal strength and vehemence in sculpture where the artist's "free thought" takes shape through the most diverse materials, from clay to clay to raw wood to precious marble white and veined, all worked with the same attention to detail and detail. Giulia Occorsio gives "life" to mythological and non-mythological forms and figures, to singular busts, folded under the artist's hand, to bas-reliefs worked with mastery and "lightness" of touch.

Profound and important themes are also the subject of analysis and representation in digital production in which the compositions are sometimes similar to the textures of ancient and precious fabrics, at other times they refer to futuristic or dreamy illusory images and, last but not least, they seem to stop and hold like the verses and rhymes of a poem, short figurative or landscape details that evoke particular exotic and distant countries. His works are similar to the effects of a kaleidoscope that generates plays of glassy reflections, multiples and dense symmetries of colors such as Metamorphosis of the Ugly Duckling and Knights which are two examples of experimentation and avant-garde artistic techniques imbued with profound poetic wisdom.

dott.ssa Enrica Pasqua

Art critic and historian

Giulia's Art Occorsio evokes evanescent presences like distant dreams that pass through the unconscious through fascinating means frames bright. Rotating colors generate feminine figures between reverberations of light and underlying interiority. Fluid threads, of ephemeral shades, sublimate towards geometric compositions, apparently suspended like vibrating veils, which hover sensitively beyond the boundaries of time.

2014 Painting and Digital Graphics – Galleria Elle, Preganziol Treviso

Prof. Gianluigi Guarneri

He loves to experiment, an artist who lets himself be guided by pure instinct in his creative phase: the works are the result of an in-depth investigation of the soul through the digital tool, they are the mirror of the acute sensitivity of an inquiring spirit that combines ancient, present and future creating an original and evocative mix.

2017 Galleria Art Time, Udine

dott. Luca Franzil

Monza Dicembre 2022

Artista poliedrica e multidimensionale,

His art is eclectic, passionate, disruptive, visionary, flecked with nostalgic and melancholic notes.

Equipped with a powerful irony, his gaze, always witty and at times mocking, crosses contemporary society, attesting to and predicting its change; scrutinizes the human soul, capturing the universal characteristics of humanity, building a DNA - imaginary yet so realistic - of the human essence.

A free spirit, with a restless mind, he makes his art multi-dimensional: from painting to sculpture to digital graphics to writing to poetry.

Constantly surrounded by these five Muses and deeply inspired by everything she manages to capture with the senses, she gives us through her art not only beauty and intellect, but also an important historical-social document.

A one-of-a-kind artist and therefore not relegatable to any movement or trend.

Giulia Occorsio expresses her creations through the gaze of someone who is fully in the world and at the same time constantly searching for an ideal and absolutely extra-ordinary dimension."

                                                                                                                                                                       Antonella Di Benedetto