The issue of identity touches all of my work, no matter what media I might be working with: painting, photography, sculpture or video. Every individual’s identity is formed by a number of disparate and even conflicting identities. The priority we give to just one of those identities over the others depends on the value system we adopt. I investigate the infinite ways prejudice can affect us and dangerously restrict our capability to relate to one another. The subjects in my paintings present no context (haircut, clothes, posture, surroundings) that might place them in a specific time frame, space or social class. Reminiscent of masks, they paradoxically lack any of the elements that normally mask a person. The viewer is forced to relate to them at a purely human-to-human level.The installation Shadow of Doubt is the single portrait of many individuals. Mutating video images of men and women of all ages and races are projected onto a portrait painted in oil on canvas, creating hybrid identities in constant transformation. In this case a mutating context is partially reintroduced and functions as the discriminatory element that changes our reading of the image.The superimposition of the images is not always perceived as such, and the spectator remains uncertain of the elements that, mutating, make the subjects so different. Shadow of Doubt questions whether the features of these diverse characters, their ‘mask’, that is the place where—at least psychologically—our identities reside, is what really defines how we perceive them, or rather other elements, such as gender, race, religion, age, or even attitude, weight or hairdos. A mix of sexes, ages and races, but also a contamination of moods, techniques and sounds. The installation is accompanied by a paradoxical soundtrack that pulls the viewer in two very different directions: a sacred chant by Hildegard von Bingen, a mystic from the year 1000, is superimposed to the very profane 1980s pop hit ‘Touch Me’ by Samantha Fox. The series of photographs accompanying the installation is the result of the juxtaposition of images obtained in three different media. The video becomes a projection onto a painted canvas that is photographed and then printed. The final print melts the elements of these different portraits and media into one single image, making it virtually impossible for the viewer to extrapolate one from the other. The result is a series of credible portraits—that is, images that our brain reads as one coherent whole, each very different from one another, yet, at a second look, all sharing the same exact traits. All different, yet all the same, a road that seems more and more the one the world is choosing.