ROME.- Andrea Festa is presenting The Cat is Under the Table, a solo exhibition by Carlotta Mazzariol, at Sala Nova. The exhibition is on view until March 19th, 2026.
Mazzariol’s presentation in Sala Nova moves through the threshold between the familiar and the elusive—moments when a scene appears instantly recognizable yet resists a stable definition. Rooted in an intimate, everyday iconography— gardens, courtyards, terraces—the works stage a suspended narrative: something has just happened, is about to happen, or has already slipped away.
The artist’ s paintings originate from a constellation of images—personal photographic archives, lived and remembered spaces, fragments found online, and invention. Across the surface, a “patch” (macchia) painting method—at once free and carefully governed—creates a permeability between figures, objects, and atmosphere, where definition and chance coexist. Presence is repeatedly deferred: figures seem elsewhere, identities hover, and the compositions hold a quiet tension, as if the image were still forming.
In The Cat Is Under the Table (2025), a garden table is set for a convivial gathering, yet no one appears. What remains are objects—traces of sociality—while a cat, hidden beneath the table, fixes its gaze toward the viewer: a discreet witness within the scene and, subtly, the scene’s destabilizing and capturing center.
Throughout the exhibition, domestic and outdoor spaces become stages for a psychology of attention—quiet, precise, and slightly unsettled. The works invite a slow looking: to read the residue of gestures, to sense the drift of time, and to notice what is present only indirectly—like the cat under the table, watching.
Carlotta Mazzariol (b. 2001, Montebelluna) is an Italian painter working between Nervesa della Battaglia and Venice. Her practice centers on painting, building images from personal photographs, remembered places, and invented scenes through a patch-based method that blends figures, objects, and atmosphere. She focuses on domestic and outdoor settings in which the narrative remains suspended and subtly unstable. She was awarded a studio at Emeroteca dell’Arte with the Civic Museums of Venice and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, and has exhibited in Chiamata alle Arti in Rome and New York.
Artist Statement: Carlotta Mazzariol
What I represent in my painting has to do with my interest in that moment when something seems familiar but at the same time eludes precise definition. Scenes in which the situation seems recognizable, yet there is always something elusive, as if a part of it remains outside, or has yet to happen, or has already happened. The figures are present but seem elsewhere; they may remind us of someone without ever being fully defined. The scenes are recognizable and concrete; the use of free brushstrokes, applied across the entire surface of the painting and then worked on to give a sense of interpenetration between figures and objects, creates a sense of general movement made up of definition and randomness. The paintings are based on images from multiple iconographic sources that I search for in my personal archives of photographs: glimpses of spaces that I live in or feel familiar with, images found on the internet, or sometimes from my imagination. I often depict outdoor and private places: gardens, courtyards, and terraces where human figures or other elements blend into the environment. Through this process, each image is linked to a certain type of everyday life that becomes something personal to me, but at the same time is transformed into an open and subjective experience.
