Exploring the reality of “distorted or inaccessible memories,” Eliana Marinari applies several layers of aerosol acrylic paint over ink and pastel drawings. In the artist’s “Recognition Memory” and “Recollection” series, portraits and still-life works are given this treatment, respectively. The resulting work is both haunting and brings reflection on our own limitations, as viewers.
On the former series, Marinari says this: “These hazy portraits challenge the viewer, as the process of face recognition becomes more difficult, semantic associations become more important. Neurons involved in face recognition are in close contact with neurons responsible to encode concepts, which respond in a very abstract way to faces. That’s how our brain goes from a perception-driven representation of face features to a memory-driven representation of concepts: meaning is attributed to each feature and qualities such as gender, identity, and appearance are translated on assumptions based on previous experiences, cultural beliefs and values.”
See more of this work below.
Using stills from early propaganda films or frontier paintings as a basis, the layered paintings of 
Emerging artist