MELISSA FONTINI

Melissa Fontini is a visual artist whose interest lies in intimacy and our relationship with the body. Since her solo show in Johannesburg, South Africa, pattern in feeling in pattern, in September 2021, she kept pushing intimate boundaries and how they relate to her process and body of work.

Influenced by her/our conservative backgrounds, Melissa wants to uncover the inner-most secrets and knowledge of the female body. And so, driven by her desire to understand vulnerability and honesty, she has created intimate landscapes that mirror our deepest fantasies, dreams, fears and/or aspirations in colour and line. While her mark-making lives in movement echoing the rhythm of the bodies she interacts with, it is the conversations between artist and sitter that drives the visual topography of her work – creating necessary transparency in the ordinary hierarchies of power, status, social class, sexuality and education.