Cenestesi

Cenestesi
Original Painting by Karin Lanini Arthofer
2025, Mixed Media on canvas
“The Filanda” Series
50 x 50 x 4 cm
(19” x 19” x 1.5” in)
 
Inspiration:
 
The title of this work, Cenestesi, represents my inner perception of my body and my age, an awareness that doesn’t arise from a single sense, but from the sum of all my sensations. This painting is a profound dialogue with that perception, expressed through raw materials, rough textures, and suspended ropes that evoke tension, weight, and balance.

At fifty, my body has become an archive of experiences, an interlacing of strength and delicacy, of memory and transformation. I have translated these inner sensations into visual and tactile elements, because skin, flesh, tendons, and muscles remember; they adapt, tighten, and relax in a continuous dance with the everyday.

The three folded fabrics, each so different yet worked in the same way, are fixed to the upper part of the canvas. I see them as pages of a book, each one bearing witness to a chapter lived, with folds that speak. From these pages fall thin cords, knots held in tension stretching downwards, ending in small weights. It is a play of gravity and resistance, the symbol of a silent dialogue between what remains anchored within me and what, instead, is ready to flow freely.