Artist in Focus - Daria Petrilli

Daria Petrilli is an Italian artist based in Rome, a city long celebrated for its deep artistic heritage. Known for her distinctive style, Petrilli has exhibited her work throughout Italy and internationally. Her art blends digital collage, photography, illustration, and painting to create evocative compositions that reinterpret the enchantment of the Italian Renaissance through a surrealist lens.

Petrilli’s work explores the fluid boundaries between reality and imagination, using an elegant and poetic visual language. Her dreamlike imagery often features ethereal figures, animals, and classical architecture set against surreal, mystical landscapes that invite the viewer into a world of introspection and wonder.

Influenced by diverse artistic disciplines—from fashion to photography—Petrilli also draws inspiration from music, which she describes as a medium that mirrors and magnifies emotion in a kaleidoscope of colour and feeling. While attuned to contemporary trends, her work is also imbued with a sense of saudade—a melancholic nostalgia for the past—which lends a haunting depth to her visual storytelling.

Among her most significant projects is her series on the Major Arcana, the most symbolic and enigmatic cards of the Tarot. For Petrilli, the Tarot represents a fusion of logic and the ideal—a form of mathematics applied to the absolute—expressing a precise and profound vision of human thought and intuition.

Her choice of digital tools was a spontaneous and personal evolution, allowing her creative process to remain fluid and instinctive. Through what is often described as magical surrealism or Pop Surrealism, she seeks to mesmerise the viewer and open doors to imaginative, dreamlike realms.