Spiritual sojourn of Shola Mara Carletti at Art Positive

"Insight, intuition, inner emblems
Signs that cleave unrepeatable colors
Indelible traces

Signs that lead to awareness
Signs that take us to face choices and challenges
Signs showing the way

Sometimes heard and seen, sometimes not...”

The above lines depict the crux of Shola Mara Carletti whose works are on view at New Delhi-based Art Positive. The artist who graduated in graphic design at ISA School of Art of Urbino in Italy, later chose to work for Gambarini-Muti, a well known Advertising Agency in Rimini, where she was a full time Creative Director for Campaigns including corporate branding, exhibitions and trade fairs. There she acquired the high standards of professionalism that now mark her oeuvre.

Throughout her career, she has imbibed influenced from her travels across the world that have widened her horizons in many ways: her rich formative experiences in communication, self-growth, meditation, yoga, etc. These became the existential background that was meant to give depth and substance to her art production.

Hence her work has been moving more and more towards the purity and poetry of art, yet maintaining a rooted and pragmatic essence. Her journey soon brought her to India where she found the ideal environment, incredibly spiritual and mundane at the same time, to establish a new phase of her work where painting and sculpture have become the focus of her activity and design a never ending story of play and passion.

She elaborates of her work in a statement: “The main component of my work is gold, a powerful and dense color, both physical and spiritual. It transpires lively, bright, transparent and fragile shades. On the one hand it is dense, and doesn’t allow light to go through; on the other it is fluid, transparent and ever changing like the light’s reflections on glass. Like all of us…”

“I am often asked about the technique I use in my paintings. I like to experiment, and most of my media are the result of trials and mistakes. I love to be surprised by the result of the mixtures, the different varnishes or materials and am fascinated by the contrasts that eventually create harmony. Like in life, a mistake can become the ultimate gift.”