LAURA ALUNNI

I knew from the beginning that a traditional portrait would be a betrayal. How do you paint a likeness of someone who was less a person and more a force of nature in your life?

This work was my answer. I had to fracture the very idea of a figure to even begin to suggest their spirit. The panels of red and gold are not decoration; they are the fragments of character I could grasp, the warmth, the passion, the resilience.

And the Plexiglas: that is their true energy, the part that always defied containment. It is the luminous current of their presence, a light that both holds the scattered pieces together and breaks through them all.

I was not sculpting a body. I was trying, with my own hands, to piece together the anatomy of a soul. In a period of my life defined by their absence, this work became everything. It became The Only Reason.