Monica Stambrini's 'Amici e familiari' exhibition at Galleria Maja Arte Contemporanea in Rome

Monica Stambrini presents an exhibition of oil paintings at Galleria Maja Arte Contemporanea in Rome through April. The artist, known for her work as a film director, employs a distinctive technique that blends visible brushstrokes with photographic realism, avoiding both hyperrealism and impressionism. Her subjects are familiar domestic scenes—friends, family, sofas, houseplants, half-drunk glasses, and books—rendered with a quiet surface that is disrupted by vibrant orange shapes emerging from beneath the paint layers. These orange reflections hint at something beneath the serene facade, sometimes revealed through playful irreverence like an explicit male nude or a sex toy depicted as ordinary decor. The exhibition's title references a 2000 line from Nobel laureate Derek Walcott's poetry collection 'Il levriero di Tiepolo.' Stambrini's background includes directing music videos and creating feminist reinterpretations of pornography, which informs the subtle tensions in her paintings. One work features succulents on a windowsill against a pure black night, suggesting light that might originate from an Indian beach behind a white cow. Faces in the portraits often smile at the viewer, transformed from subjects into objects within the domestic setting.