About
I'm Emanuele Fortunati, a conceptual artist. I don't try to close that distance. I make it visible.
Where it started
For years I followed every convention to earn my place in society: a successful career in tech, stability, and a lot of stress. Then I swung to the opposite and became the black sheep, looking for something more authentic. Both times, staying coherent with my choice meant cutting off a part of myself.
So I stopped believing identity has to be coherent. For me, contradiction isn't a flaw, or a phase. It's the condition of being human.
How a work is made
Every work goes through the same three phases. The art doesn't illustrate the research: it is the research.
Between what someone is and what their world asks them to be. Mine, for example: someone compliments something I did, and I look down instead of letting it land. One part of me wants to be seen. Another learned that being seen is arrogant. Both are mine.
I don't rush to pick one. I stay inside that discomfort, and that's where a painting starts.
Physically, instinctively, with my reasoning switched off as far as I can. What lands on the canvas isn't a picture of the conflict: it's the trace it leaves.
I come back to the canvas cold and read it symbol by symbol, until I can name the exact contradictions that made it.
A series, an installation, a participatory project. Not to explain my conflict to you, but to give you the conditions to recognise your own.
My work offers no solutions. It makes a condition visible.
The paintings in the collection
Every painting in the collection comes from that first, instinctive moment: the conflict, before I understood it. They're the raw material the whole practice is built on.
Some of them go further, and become the starting point of a conceptual project. Or even the project itself.
The conceptual projects have their own home, at emanuelefortunati.it.
Why I sell them this way
You recognise something in it before you can say what.
In our two conversations, we find the words for it, together.
My process, applied to you.
Discover the experienceExhibited
Or something made from your own story: The Marker · Commissions