“Breath of lightness” | Curatorial Essay

The following is the curatorial essay written by Mattia Andres Lombardo about the solo show of my works, Inner Calligraphics, at the Studio DFB gallery in Rome, April 16 – 30, 2026. The show is curated by Lombardo and Anamarija Runtic, and is hosted by Alberto Di Fabio.

 

“Nothing maintains its appearance, and nature, the renewer of things, draws forms from forms. Nothing, believe me, perishes in the entire universe, but everything varies and changes its face.”

Ovid
Metamorphoses
Book XV, 252-255

The central teaching of Ovid’s Metamorphoses lies in the idea that everything changes, nothing remains fixed or succumbs forever (omnia mutantur, nihil interit). The poem is not only a collection of myths, it is a compelling and profound reflection on the fluidity of the universe and of human identity. An idea that has profoundly shaped the entire work of Claudia Palmira, an artist born in New York, and now based in Rome.

Inner Calligraphics is the title chosen for her solo exhibition at Studio DFB, an inner calligraphy reaching outward to seize the eye. Works that seek empathy, something we are tragically losing.

An anthological and mutable exhibition bringing together different techniques, from sumi ink on wood to digital art – works that move fluidly between meaning and its metamorphosis toward vibrational marks. Claudia Palmira’s works trace the symbolic journey a word can make, transforming into a symbol not to be deciphered, but to be recognized and claimed in the very moment it is seen.

An inner calligraphy that begins as evocative writing and dissolves into abstract, unconscious graphism. Where one word yields, another approaches and melts away.

Sumi ink, dense and abundant, paints the word beauty, a symbol-word that radiates and shatters across all of Claudia’s work. Words multiply; interweavings of signs come alive on paper in a dynamic metamorphosis that recalls the elegant graphism of Japanese writing, and above all the Dibujos Escritos of Argentine artist León Ferrari. Manuscripts that speak to an invisible, interior writing, created to be read with the third eye, that of higher awareness, gesturing toward a poetics of surrealist origin.

Ovid is the name of Claudia’s three large works on wood. A tribute to the kinetic force of Ovidian metamorphosis, works where what transforms is first and foremost color, impatient to saturate the wonder of myth with the change of nature.

Nothing dies, everything moves, like Claudia’s breath of lightness in a heavy time.

A calligraphy of the soul that moves like an inner wave, giving life to a graphic flow that could extend, hypothetically, to infinity, a mantra in which to lose oneself.

—Mattia Andres Lombardo