By Pamela Fink

I see your true colors 
that's why i love you 

The great 80s song by Cyndi Lauper talks about how in a grey world someone who shows their authentic self or their “true colors” is able to illuminate the darkness and shine like a rainbow. 

A similar feeling overwhelmed the painter. Filippo Giusti who, fed up with the conventional aesthetics of classical portraits, ventured to go further with something he calls “Essentialism.” 

Beyond being a pictorial movement, this proposal presents a new way of looking at a person; delving deeper into the essence of the being and leaving appearances behind and, in an exercise of imagination, noticing the colors inside this being. 

To get to know more about the subject of your portrait and its true colors, Filippo He likes to have an interview with the person as well as to know some of their predilections both in books and music. It is then that he begins to read those books and listen to those songs as a source of empathetic inspiration that he will soon translate into his portraits that in pieces lose their realism and show the tone of the subject's interior.

It is surprising to see the mastery behind the paintings and to learn that the Italian painter never went to a painting school, but that his origins lay in acting and photography, which allowed him to develop his new art with mastery. From acting he learned to look at himself more vulnerably and from photography basic things like color theory and composition.

It was when he decided to take up painting that he illustrated himself with multiple videos from platforms such as YouTube and photos from both Instagram and Google Art & Culture, which is a high-quality image bank of the greatest paintings, which allowed him to zoom in on the images and notice subtleties such as the way Rembrandt achieves yellowish tones using grey as a base. 

Thanks to this obsessive self-taught training, Filippo acquired great technique but it was not until during the pandemic, after many moments of introspection, that he would acquire what is now known as essentialism. 

Once you arrive in San Miguel and specifically in La Aurora Factory, was that he discovered a large number of painters in the old factory and after questioning them, he came to the conclusion that indeed, one can live from art. There he was fortunate to work for an artist while he created his first painting and from then on it was all history. 

Having had great success and acceptance, Filippo now has his own gallery within La Aurora and continues to generate striking portraits that contrast realism with the surrealism of internal color, being one of the favorites of the San Miguel community.

It is worth mentioning one of the most satisfying experiences he has had and the first mural he made was that of “Sofia” in which, commissioned by the Italian embassy, he made a 7-meter mural in collaboration with the Doctor Sonrisas foundation, whose laudable mission is to fulfill the dreams of children with advanced illnesses. 

One of the children's dreams was to be an artist, so when choosing little 6-year-old Sofia to portray her, Filippo was in charge of painting the realistic parts while many of the foundation's children were commissioned to paint Sofia's colors, thus achieving a beautiful fusion between the colorful vision of the children and the artist, thus showing that each stroke generated from an empathetic and imaginative place is a stroke that can paint the world.

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