Elena Rossi

Between two languages there is always a third, unspoken thing, and that gap is where my work lives. I grew up switching between Italian at home and German at school, and I never fully trusted either language to hold the whole of what I meant. My paintings layer collage, handwritten text and paint in ways that mirror that experience: words appear half-legible, sentences get interrupted by torn paper or a wash of colour, meaning is always slightly out of reach. I often work with fragments from old letters my grandmother sent, cut apart and rearranged so their original sense dissolves into something more textural than literal. I am not trying to translate one culture into another. I am trying to paint the specific, slippery space of living between them, where identity is built more from gaps and mistranslations than from any single fixed language.