Sguardi (Gazes)
A pictorical project by Manuel Capaccioli (2025)
Project Statement
Sguardi (Gazes) is an autonomous chapter within the broader project Promesse (Promises), which originated from the painting I tuoi occhi blu mi guardano fallire, ancora (Your blue eyes watch me fail, again). The cycle explores the themes that run throughout the entire project—failure, broken promises, fragmented identity—translating them into a deeply intimate and autobiographical visual investigation that touches on universal dimensions.
Composed of six oil and charcoal on canvas works, Sguardi unfolds as a chronological journey from the places of my childhood to the present. Each piece originates from the reflection captured in the eyes portrayed: mirror-like surfaces in which spaces, memories, and emotional states emerge—elements that do not belong solely to the subjects, but become zones of confrontation with what I had tried not to see in myself.
The device of the gaze thus becomes a site of resistance and revelation: a point where observer and observed exchange roles, generating a dialogue that challenges certainties and raises questions about identity, vulnerability, and the construction of the self.
Sguardi represents a radical search for honesty. Exposing oneself through the reflection in the eyes of others means accepting the risk of truth, fragility, and contradiction. The cycle concludes with a self-portrait reflected in my own eye: an image that evokes disorientation and the always-illusory attempt to know oneself and find calm within an existence that does not always return a sense of peace.
Promesse (Promises)
A pictorical project by Manuel Capaccioli (2025)
Project Statement
Is it worth living in a lie, when the promises on which we built our identity turn out to be illusions? When the constant pursuit of balance, inner success, and peace reveals itself as an act of self-manipulation, meant to give meaning to an otherwise chaotic, empty, incomprehensible reality?
Promesse (Promises) is a project currently articulated in a cycle of ten oil and charcoal works on canvas, that explores failure as an existential condition and reflects on the meaning — and the loss of meaning — in living. Through a raw and emotional pictorial language, I perform an act of self-analysis, laying bare my deepest vulnerabilities, which become a mirror of collective and universal unease.
The project addresses, without rhetoric, themes of personal failure, fractured identity, self-sabotage, and dissolution within social roles. It explores the margins of disillusionment and the cracks in societal constructs that promise well-being in exchange for adaptation and silence. The works expose a radical vulnerability, in contrast to the brutality of the external world, questioning the idea of personal progress as salvation, to instead narrate an inner cycle of struggle, disillusionment, and acceptance.
There is no comfort: Promesse offers no escape routes, only a lucid and conscious surrender.
In a time that rewards appearance and efficiency, Promesse proposes a poetics of doubt, of wounding, and of breakdown as a form of honesty and perhaps inner resistance.
The only promise kept, then, is that of doubt.