Camilla Cesarini, better known as Armadilly, is a young artist (Pesaro, 1995) who through her work tells her own story, describes the world around her and the digital age. Her works, made with meticulous attention and craftsmanship, come across as an immediate message: a visual simplification that needs no intermediation. Armadilly, who this year participates in Contextile, the Biennial dedicated to textile art held in Portugal, granted Juliet Art Magazine an interview.

Claudia Pansera: Who is Camilla Cesarini, aka Armadilly?
Camilla Cesarini: Armadilly is an eternal teenager, lover of pink and glitter, always looking for the best pool parties and lovers to entertain with her spicy sarcasm. I like to think that this stage name is my alter ego, as I am actually twenty-seven and much quieter in everyday life, although a kernel of truth exists.

Your works are extremely recognizable. How did you come to this kind of expression?
I have always been drawing and doing handmade things since a very young age. When I first interested in fashion, I was about eleven years old and all I did was to create moodboards by collecting all the things I liked. In high school I studied fashion and graphic design and then I graduated in Comics and Illustration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Among the aspects of the Academy I liked the most, there is having the opportunity to study also subjects like contemporary art history or film history; these artistic subjects helped in shaping my style. I think it is crucial for the artist to draw from everything around him or her and to not stop at just his or her artistic field in order to develop something interesting. For me, for examples, the social media are fundamental, but if I had to list some of my favorite artists, I would say Roy Lichtenstein, Brecht Evens, Jessica Craig-Martin, Olimpia Zagnoli, Antti Lovag and Ettore Sottsass… However, the thick black outlines of my works are the result of many mistakes made while searching for the perfection of the mark and, at the same time, they are a protection from what remains outside.

What does your art tell about?
Love and its contrary, disillusioned youth, the need to please people at all costs and chronic anxiety. Lot of irony and sarcasm, no room for a genuine happiness. I talk about what I experience every day by giving it a glamorous and glittering aspect. Mine are seemingly frivolous paintings, but they hide an underlying sense of malaise. We are pervaded by images on Instagram that do nothing but make us feel less than what we really are: never beautiful enough, never rich enough, never interesting enough. This is not a new issue, it probably started with the arrival of supermodels and movie stars as pop icons, the social networks have just exacerbated this. My intent is not necessarily to criticize young people for this, because I am succumbing to it myself, but I would like to highlight this system that creates so much malaise by using a simple and impactful graphic that could make the message accessible to everyone

You are one of the selected artists to participate in Contextile 2022, the Textile Art Biennial held in Portugal. Can you talk us about this experience?
Being one of the selected artists for Contextile 2022 represents to me a great honor and I can only be proud of it, also considering the quality of the exhibited works. I had the pleasure of getting to know another selected artist, Madalena Pequito, who brought the work Lençol, a kind of malleable mesh made of glass rings that can change shape creating always new possibilities. It was good to compare each other, because by discovering the art of another country one can understand how different it is to grow up with other cultural references, thus the influence those ones have had on today’s artists. Among the others Contextile artists who impressed me the most there are: João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, Paloma de la Cruz, Pascal Monteil and Reyhaneh Alikhani. Not to mention that Portugal is a beautiful country that has definitely enriched me.

Which are the pieces that you exhibited at Contextile?
Depressed but well dressed (2021) and Italian Summer (2021), which are two of my favorite ones and also the most representative works of my investigation.

You are a very young artist: how do you envision your future in the art world?
The road is long, but I imagine other important collaborations with my curator Gemma Gulisano, a key figure in my life as an artist. My hope is to be able to travel a lot in order to get to know more and more things, in Italy and abroad, maybe even participating in artist residencies or doing exhibitions; at the same time I would like to become an active figure in the cultural life of my city, Pesaro, which recently had been selected as the Italian Capital of Culture 2024. This is an ambitious project that I hope I can be able to accomplish.

Claudia Pansera

Info:

Armadilly, Contemporary Textile Art Biennial 2022
03/09/2022 – 30/10/2022
Guimarães, Portogallo
contextile.pt/2022