BF of the year

BF of the Year revisits a memory from my teenage years with my first boyfriend, who often told me I was “not like other girls.” What made me “different” was not only my personality but my ethnicity, my family’s background, my religion, my vegetarian diet and my early passion for art. To him, my way of being me, was “exotic”. A curiosity he emphasized constantly, as if it were both a gift and a flaw. At the same time, he reminded me these differences weren’t “normal,” and that I might never truly belong part of “normal society”, never be “like other girls.” even though all I wanted at the time was to be treated with the same simplicity and humanity as anyone else, without my identity, appearances or name speaking louder than who I really was and wanted to perceived as.

This made the phrase “you are not like other girls” carry a very different weight than the usual trope. In my case, it became a reminder of how easily identity can be reduced to labels, how difference is both fetishized and marginalized, and how painful it can feel to be marked as the other.

BF of the Year is part of my ongoing series of paintings “Legati al dito”, which takes its name from the Italian idiom legarsela al dito…to “tie something around your finger,” a way of saying that a memory or grievance is impossible to forget.

Each work in this series is born from moments in my life when I felt powerless in the face of injustice experiences, but which marked me so deeply that they became indelible. These memories have stayed with me, vivid and insistent, much like the fluorescent and metallic colors I chose to work with. The palette is intentionally resistant to digital reproduction: only in person can the works fully reveal themselves, a reminder of how visceral and inescapable these experiences truly are.

Although they are “pain paintings” by definition, there is also irony and playfulness in them. The sharpness of the memories coexists with a kind of absurdity, a refusal to let them remain silent. Many of my friends—non-white, queer, refugees, migrants and “second-generation” migrants, kids adopted from different counties, just people living precarious lives could recognize themselves in these serie of works, in the way personal stories carry both symbolic weight and real, and lived consequences. This resonance feels powerful to me: these paintings are not only about my past, but also about shared survival, remembrance, resilience and defiance.