Matilde Milan

Matilde Milan's visual art transcends mere painting and ceramics: it’s a powerful demonstration of how irony can become the most effective artistic technique.

Milan employs a strongly ironic and color-saturated visual language for a specific purpose: irony serves as her primary filter. This process allows her to metabolize and rework everything she encounters—from personal insecurities to daily life—transforming lived experience into exaggerated, totemic, or amusing symbols. Effectively, she constructs a personal mythology for self-defense and self-acceptance.

We find her practice particularly compelling, both for its unique process and for the way art acts as a concrete tool for accepting difficult episodes and challenging parts of one's personal life.

We asked her to tell us more about her most recent work. We now leave you directly with Matilde's words.

“My artistic practice unfolds between painting and ceramics, articulated through an ironic visual language. My work is distinguished by the use of saturated colors, precise graphic lines, and a playful tone that transforms everyday moments and personal experiences into symbolic and imaginative shapes.

Central to my practice is the act of translating lived experiences and people I encounter into symbols, animals or exaggerated characters. By amplifying my perceptions to the extreme and filtering them through irony, I create a personal mythology: a universe where encounters and insecurities are given a new shape. Irony is not merely an aesthetic choice but a tool that allows me to metabolize and reframe everything that happens to me, turning that into visual statements.

In my paintings, I employ acrylic colors applied in multiple layers to achieve maximum chromatic intensity and luminosity. This deliberate process allows color itself to become a central element, commanding the viewer’s gaze. My subjects emerge from real-life encounters and self-reflection, and are translated into ironic figures, totemic animals, or symbolic forms that mirror my inner landscape and my way of observing the world.

My most recent work, Laughing at Myself, is a self-portrait focusing on my mouth, painted on a circular canvas with a diameter of 90 cm. For many years, this part of my body represented something to conceal — missing or crooked teeth, restrained smiles before the mirror. This piece was conceived as an act of acceptance and catharsis: a mouth that stares back at me, confronts me, and laughs unashamedly in my face. The circular format of the canvas ironically echoes the mirror frame that long served as a silent judge, while the saturated palette demands observation.

Through irony and color, I seek to establish a dialogue with my own fragilities and experiences, to transform them into a space of expression and catharsis.”

Matilde Milan,

Studio Fibra