Italian digital artists are still slowly creating their own niche with special exhibitions and competitions in order to reach the public and gain recognition.  Through this activity they are diminishing the distrust and skepticism many people have toward the media and educating them to the creative potential of digital technology.

To open a space in this world still under exploration, I want talk about an interesting and evocative artist: Japi Honoo. She’s in the fact an Italian artist, but linked to Japanese culture by an inexplicable affinity. Self-taught, she was fond of drawing since her childhood, and began her artistic journey through a progressive empirical  knowledge of digital art and the application of photo manipulation. Japi uses such programs as Photoshop and Illustrator  to reinterpret and express obsessions and fantasies that had also been the focus of  such great surrealist artists  as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. The central theme of her work is the female body; manipulated, distorted and extended until reaching the Whole. The delicate and almost impalpable colours in her pictures  evoke  the gentle and dreamy atmosphere of Japanese aesthetics and artistic  tradition.

Japi Honoo describes her imagery as stories of  her  “state of mind”.  Her stories  express  “feeling out of time and belong to every age.”  For Japi, digital techniques can assume  the same function as the paint brush, enabling her  to create new worlds and possibilities for the interpretation of femininity. Subject to reinterpretation are the central and eternal themes of the feminine dimension: sexuality, vanity, body degeneration, pregnancy and maternity. To do this, she utilizes the bodies of models who reflect the current concept of beauty, and then distorts them, creating and alienation in the viewer that raises questions and concerns regarding all the aforementioned feminine themes. Japi says that this artistic choice is due to her indifference to  “perfection” and instead prefers the “single being “.  She wants to  “give an authentic  life to those bodies, so they can tell personal and universal stories”. Visionary artists  may indulge in various technical and creative strategies.  They can follow the knowledge and path of the  Old Masters’ techniques, like the mixed technique of egg tempera and oils as employed by Ernst Fuchs, or they can explore new media, as  is  happening with artists like Peter Gric or Japi Honoo. Whatever route they choose the destination is always the same: to create worlds full of artistic sensitivity and ecstasy in which the viewer is invited to become  immersed.