“Parole, Parole, Parole” celebrates friendship as a tool to protect ourselves from radicalization. As Hannah Arendt meant — it’s the loneliness that leads people to political extremism.
The painting continues my long-term engagement with history painting as a critical field in which established hierarchies of visibility are questioned rather than reinforced. Instead of using composition and light to glorify singular protagonists—as in traditional academic painting—the work explores the mutual entanglement of macro-history and intimate lived experience.

At the left side of the composition, Clio observes historical processes through a narrow opening, suggesting that history is always partial, mediated, and written by victors. Her space, filled with marble forms inspired by Fra Angelico, evokes a realm beyond material reality. The painting emerged from research undertaken during a trip to Capri, where I explored how sexual minorities sought refuge during fascist and Nazi regimes. The spectral presence of Natalie Clifford Barney and her partner Renée Vivien appears on the surface of the sea, while a glossary of island histories transforms into wave-like structures across the image.

Rather than relying exclusively on institutional archives, the work proposes imagination and embodied memory as alternative historical tools. The central scene depicts three figures—based on myself and companions—after a visit to the Blue Grotto, inhabiting a space where contemporary experience merges with myth. They transform into figures resembling Minerva, Mercury, and Pan, suggesting that individual agency is always shaped by historical and systemic forces. A Medusa motif references archaeological discoveries in Naples, while on the right, Ludwig II of Bavaria appears under the spell of Venus, recalling his artificial grotto at Linderhof Palace and emphasizing the persistent interplay between fantasy, power, and desire.

A fool figure steps toward the edge of the composition, embodying nonconformity and courage in the face of the unknown—qualities positioned against the fear exploited by authoritarian propaganda. The sky above consists of geometric bands derived from the color frequencies of historical and contemporary totalitarian flags, creating a stark abstraction that contrasts with the fluid, queer sea below. The trajectory of Cupid’s arrow remains unresolved, leaving open whether desire is directed toward history itself or toward those who attempt to rewrite it.