When the darkness is no longer frightening, pencil and acrylic on canvas mounted on board

Nunzio Paci lives and works in Italy, where he creates paintings, drawings, and combinations of the two that reference anatomical and scientific illustration while exploring abstracted compositions. In recent drawings and paintings, the artist combines anatomical and floral.

The instability of flesh, oil and pencil on canvas

The slightly soft texture, and pastel palette of Paci’s images belies the painstaking detail that the artist crams into each figure. In recent paintings, the forms of animals -- foxes, deer, wolves, even humans -- are depicted in the partly-skinned or half-transparent method of scientific drawing. Yet they stray from become academic: instead, the artist fills in the space between skin and bones with lush bunches of flowers and plants that seem to spill out of the figure and take over the image.

Paci’s works remind me a lot of Kaylee Dalton’s, particularly in the way that both artists balance stark negative space with energetic masses of form and color. Paci also draws in black and white, incorporating that negative space directly into the forms of his subjects.

Nostalgia for the day, pencil on paper