ELENA PINTAURO. BEFORE COLOUR

Following the opening of Tracce di colore (Traces of Colour), we meet the young Italian artist Elena Pintauro (NINA) to discuss landscape, observation, and time.

ROME - The murmur of the opening continues even after many visitors have left the Bar delle Tartarughe. Someone returns to the same painting; others speak quietly about colour, texture, and surface. In the heart of the historic centre, this space has become a point of reference within Rome's contemporary cultural scene, hosting young artists and transforming an everyday place into one dedicated to dialogue between art and the public.

It is here that Elena Pintauro, known as NINA, presents Tracce di colore (Traces of Colour), her first solo exhibition, curated by Edoardo Riccio Cobucci. We meet as the room begins to empty and the paintings are finally left alone on the walls. The conversation soon turns to what generated them: time, landscape, and the act of observing.

In recent years, many young artists have brought nature back to the centre of their work. Not as a view to be represented, but as a space through which to question change. While some reflect on environmental transformation and the climate crisis, others observe how light, seasons, and time continually alter our perception of places. Landscape thus returns as an interlocutor, rather than merely a subject.

At twenty-one, Elena Pintauro lives and studies in Italy, where she attends the Accademia Costume & Moda in Rome. Her artistic practice begins with a need to listen and observe that comes before painting. Before colour, there is writing. Thoughts, impressions, and fragments of daily life are gathered in a notebook that accompanies every phase of her work. Those pages become the place where experiences and perceptions slowly begin to settle.

Only later do acrylic, watercolour, and the physical texture of paint enter the work.

Her exploration also extends to the supports she works on: from canvas to paper, and even graph paper, used not as a grid to follow but as a surface to cross and transform. The dialogue between different materials allows her to explore recurring tensions: balance and instability, control and spontaneity, density and transparency, while leaving the painterly gesture open to the unexpected. Each work preserves traces of its own process, without concealing the time that constructed it.

Mezza luna (Half Moon), watercolour, oil pastel, and India ink on graph paper, 21 x 31 cm.

This attentiveness also shapes her way of travelling.

Every departure coincides with a new notebook. Rather than collecting images, Elena records what a place leaves in the gaze: a shift in light, the reflection of the sea, the wind altering a landscape, the silence of a beach in winter. Back in the studio, those fragments pass through a period of waiting before becoming painting.

For this reason, landscape never becomes simply the subject of her works. It becomes an experience.

The sea, the sky, the mountain, and the light are not described, but evoked through colour, texture, and surface. The canvases register change: the change of nature, and the change in the gaze that observes it. In this sense, painting becomes the place where time leaves a visible trace.

The works on display in Tracce di colore give form to this exploration through different visual languages. Luce che nasce (Nascent Light) builds a luminous presence through layers of colour.

Luce che nasce, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 100 cm.

Naissance du mouvement - Nascita del movimento (Birth of Movement) brings fields of colour into dialogue, suspended between energy and stillness.

Naissance du mouvement - Nascita del movimento, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 50 cm.

Donna nel verde (Woman in Green) explores the relationship between space, pause, and breath, evoking a dimension of inner silence.

Donna nel verde, acrylic and India ink on canvas, 70 x 100 cm.

Alongside the canvases, her work on paper opens a more intimate dimension: Mezza luna transforms the grid of the support into a space open to the unexpected, while Tracce di sogno (Traces of Dream) brings together six original mini-works inspired by the oneiric world, with spontaneous marks, delicate chromatic tones, and intimate atmospheres.

Tracce di sogno, series of 6 original mini-works, watercolour and India ink on paper, 18 x 24 cm each.

The exhibition also includes works that have already been acquired, such as Nel blu (Into the Blue) and Corallo (Coral), testifying to the public's interest in NINA's chromatic research.

Nel blu, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 100 cm. Sold.

Corallo, acrylic and India ink on canvas, 70 x 100 cm. Sold.

A significant chapter in this path took shape during an artist residency at Casa Livia in Positano. Far from the familiar summer image of the Amalfi Coast, Elena chose to experience its winter, when the town slows down and the landscape changes continuously. From that experience came a group of works dedicated to the dialogue between sky, sea, and light. Dove il cielo incontra il mare (Where the Sky Meets the Sea) conveys the time spent inhabiting that place more than its image. Today, those works are part of Casa Livia's permanent collection, in the same place where they were conceived, continuing the dialogue with the landscape that generated them.

At the same time, her training at the Accademia Costume & Moda gives her work another rhythm: research, design, and experimentation. Painting, by contrast, retains a slower temporality. Between these two speeds, a language still in evolution takes shape, capable of holding method and freedom together.

Rather than offering a reading of nature, NINA's work invites us to reflect on how we look at it. Her works do not propose a single interpretation. They ask for time, the same time the artist gives to places before transforming them into painting.

Each viewer is free to recognise in them a landscape, a memory, an emotion, or simply an equilibrium of forms and colours. The painting is completed in the gaze of the person who moves through it. This openness is precisely what makes her work a space of encounter between the artist's experience and that of the public.

Leaving the Bar delle Tartarughe, a distinct feeling remains. Tracce di colore does not only tell the story of a young artist's path. It speaks of the value of attention. In a present that teaches us to consume images and experiences quickly, Elena Pintauro's painting suggests a simple gesture: to stop.

Perhaps landscape continues to interest so many contemporary artists not only because of what it shows, but because, when observed for long enough, it also changes the way we look at the world.

Information

Official website: elenapintauro-nina

Instagram: @niina99c

Bar delle Tartarughe - Rome: bardelletartarughe.it

Casa Livia - Positano: https://bit.ly/casa-livia-positano

To follow the work of Elena Pintauro (NINA), learn more about her practice, or find out which works are available, visit her official website and social media channels.

Elena Pintauro (NINA)

by Stefano Corso Photography

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