The Vertigine Series

The Vertigine series is one of Manuel Felisi’s most intense and distinctive projects, representing one of the most poetic peaks of his artistic research. In these works, painting and photography merge into a layered and vibrant visual language, capable of offering a perceptive and emotional experience that deeply engages the viewer, stimulating memory and inviting the discovery of hidden details within the natural landscape.

Felisi draws from his photographic archive—shots of branches, trees, walks in the woods—to build mental landscapes where natural elements are multiplied, decomposed, and recomposed according to a modular artworks built from memory and nature.

The vegetal subjects thus become emotional grids, maps of the soul where time settles through repeated gestures, overlapping pigments, and surface layering. The final effect is a visual, but also inner, vertigo: the eye gets lost in details while the mind embarks on a journey through fragments of memories. Felisi’s poetic vision revolves around themes such as time, memory, nature, and transformation.

Born in Milan in 1976 and trained at the Brera Academy, Manuel Felisi has developed a coherent and personal language rooted in the hybridization of techniques and materials: wood, canvas, pigments, photography, and even real branches used as mnemonic devices. His practice moves confidently across different fields—from painting to photography to installation—while always returning to a central and universal theme: Time.

Time becomes both subject and medium in his work: the fleeting instant of a photographic shot digitally re-elaborated and transferred to canvas, the slow ritual layering of pigments and materials, the persistence of memory that preserves or dissolves forms. In series such as Vertigini, Rigenerazioni, Uno a uno, and Radici, a continuous tension emerges between order and chaos, figure and dissolution, presence and absence.

Felisi tells this story of Time in a “kind” way, never nostalgic, but rather with poetic and emotional inspiration. His works—made of several material layers assembled with scientific order yet always imbued with deep involvement—are permeated by vitality, even when addressing the most intimate or touching subjects. They invite the viewer into a unique and unrepeatable encounter, where sounds, colors, and atmospheres converge to create a personal, sensory dialogue with Space and Time.

His artworks have been exhibited in prestigious museums and institutional spaces across Italy, including the Carlo Bilotti Museum in Rome, Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, the Botanical Garden of Palermo, and the Rotonda della Besana in Milan. Through this consolidated presence, Manuel Felisi affirms himself as one of the most sensitive and original voices in contemporary Italian art.