The first painting I created is a digital piece born from end-of-year rituals. In it, I paint that strange festive night—after an overly heavy dinner—when family gathers and the warmth of the lights contrasts with a soft, almost muted fatigue. It’s the moment when you feel saturation: too much food, too many gifts, too many words, too many people… and above all, the overflow of consumerism, that quiet intoxication that clings to the holidays like a second skin.
This feeling isn’t the same as being out with friends. There, the air moves differently, the rhythm changes, and the painting would breathe in another way, with a different tension. Here, I chose the other side: the home, the ritual, the warm yet oppressive sense of “already seen.”
I wanted to paint that renewal we believe we can hold in our hands when the New Year turns—an opening toward opportunity, adventure, momentum. A dense, almost electric kind of hope. And yet this renewal looks strangely like the one before it. The same faces, the same seats, almost the same conversations. A loop repeating with a slight shift.
That’s where the ambivalence begins: we tell ourselves more—stronger, better, more efficient, more “improved.” We promise to level up, to surpass ourselves, to reinvent who we are. Then, with a calm lucidity, we realize we are often the same person as last year—simply a little older, a little more experienced… not necessarily better.
This painting is a portrait of that paradox: a moment suspended between excess and stillness, between hope and repetition, between the promise of becoming and the reality of remaining. A troubled feeling, yet familiar—like festive light flickering at the back of a quiet room.