“If you are lucky enough to understand what privilege you have been given, your eyes will inevitably fill with light and color.”

Marianna Simonetti was born in Melfi, a small town in southern Italy, in 1979. From her town she began her education, attending the Liceo Artistico “P. Festa Campanile,” where she graduated. Soon after, she passed the admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in the “painting” department but renounced the idea.

“...With or without that consensus, my life would never question my strong passion for art.”

She then abandoned the academic studies, to begin another journey of formation at the University of Architecture of Naples “Federico II,” where in May 2004 she graduated and in the same year she qualified as a freelance architect.

It is precisely in the Neapolitan city, that the artist finds and expresses her creative flair by getting in close contact with the most intimate part of herself; And it is thanks to this continuous stylistic research, begun thirty years ago, that her works today are very distinguished from among others.

The ideas Simonetti addressed are social issues such as, and above all, the choice of subjects. The latter are always women with a distinguishable detail “eyes closed”; the reason for this choice lies precisely in the search for feeling, through the whole figure.

The artist, therefore, represents feelings and emotions, through the female universe made precisely of gestures, attitudes, conversations and complicity. The paintings are immersed in light, the women and girls emanate light, colors and beauty. In the polyptychs, Marianna Simonetti, tackles a story or treats delicately a theme giving rise to positive emotions. She describes well-achieved and elegant women who gracefully make delicate and simple gestures. It is a femininity that looks to the past with an eye on the present and steady steps towards the future without delay and judgment, only with decisiveness. Figures about which, Angelo Crespi wrote - in the introductory note to the book and catalog of Marianna's solo exhibition, “Feminine Lights of Colored Souls,” held at the Mondadori space - “the metaphysical vein intersected with an apparent naiveté.”

Marianna Simonetti perceives the passage of light within souls translated into colors, reflected and depicted in different attitudes for each creature. For that reason, colors are fundamental in the Simonetti’s artworks. Colors are selected and employed according to criteria whose foundation rely on color theory.

Marianna likes to reiterate that everyone, in front of a work, whether it is pictorial or derived from human creativity, can feel himself, through very personal vibrations that involves to the deepest of emotions.