Daniele Fortuna, Reimagining Antiquity In Color!
Aldo Castillo Gallery presents Daniele Fortuna, the Milanese sculptor who reimagines the Mona Lisa, Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, and the nymphs and goddesses of antiquity through hundreds of hand-cut layers of wood, transforming them with the vibrant colors of today.
From a distance, his sculptures appear almost digital, as though produced by a machine. Up close, their meticulous craftsmanship is revealed: every layer is drawn, cut, sanded, assembled, and painted by hand.
“I prefer people to be amazed afterwards rather than before.”
— Daniele Fortuna
Aldo Castillo Gallery has exhibited Fortuna’s work at solo shows at all our galleries and Art Miami and Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, continuing its commitment to bringing his contemporary vision of Italy’s artistic heritage to international collectors.
Colormination
The Sculptures Were Never White!
The marble gods of ancient Greece and Rome were once alive with color. Over centuries, weathering, burial, and restoration stripped away much of their pigment, leaving the white marble we recognize today.
"Le statue classiche in realtà non erano bianche, ma colorate"
“Classical statues were not actually white, but colored.”
Daniele Fortuna, Interview, Deodato Arte, 2022
Fortuna calls it Colormination, a fusion of color and contamination. He imagines that inside white marble lie all the colors it has lost, with each color also representing the many sides of who we are.
Nymph (2022) is nearly five feet tall. She sits on a rock with a jar at her side, as classical sculptors showed the nymphs of springs and rivers. Move around her and the layers catch the light like contour lines.
Seen whole, her colour rises from blue at the base, through green, to rose at the head.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Look at the face and the layers appear. Each step of the profile is one sheet of wood, cut to its own contour, like the lines on a map.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Her hand rests on her knee. The stepping that reads as a pattern from afar is the record of how she was built, layer by layer.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Below the waist the drapery falls over the rock in folds built from the same strata; the jar beside her is cut the same way.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Cut, painted, and assembled wood becomes a sculptural form.
How are the Sculptures made?
Every sculpture begins like a building, with a drawing, a plan and elevations. “I have always worked starting from a plan, from orthogonal projections,” Fortuna says. “From there you reach the third dimension.”
Each wooden layer is hand-cut, sanded, assembled, and painted. Fortuna approaches color instinctively: “When I see the finished sculpture, I understand what color I want to give it.”
Every layer begins as a drawing on a flat sheet of wood. Each one is cut to its own contour, then sanded smooth.
The layers are stacked in order and fixed together, and the form rises like a building, one floor at a time.
Gaps between the layers are filled with plaster and refined, and the wood is primed before any color goes on.
Color comes last, chosen by instinct once the form exists, and laid by hand in bands and gradients, the way Nymph rises from blue to rose.
Here a white figure opens on a seam of stripes: Colormination, the color he imagines still hidden inside white marble.
Some works are finished in gold, pressed by hand into the steps of the wood.
Bust with Flowers (2023) is built like every Fortuna figure, from stacked layers of wood, and finished in two ways at once: half museum white, half covered in flowers.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Close to, the face dissolves into its layers. Brow, nose and lips are each drawn by the edge of a sheet of wood.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Over the stepped wood he lays paper printed with roses and violets. Look closely and the ridges of the layers show through the print.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
At the foot of the bust, a trail of violets escapes the collage onto the white.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
“Al buio, con la luce spenta, la mia testa comincia a viaggiare. Comincio a mettere i tasselli di quello che mi è interessato durante la giornata.”
In the dark, with the light off, my head starts to travel. I begin to fit together the pieces of what interested me during the day.
Daniele Fortuna, Interview, Deodato Arte, 2022
The word he uses for those pieces, tasselli, is also the word for the blocks of wood he builds with.
Born in Milan, 1981
Daniele Fortuna
Born into a family of art collectors, Daniele Fortuna grew up surrounded by art, visiting artists’ studios and galleries from an early age. He later studied at the European Institute of Design in Milan, developing the creative foundation for his distinctive sculptural language.
In Ireland, Fortuna discovered wood: a material he describes as “Warm” and Tactile. Back in Italy, his flat, puzzle like compositions evolved into layered forms, and by 2011, Wood became Sculpture. This process eventually led him to reinterpret classical and Neoclassical forms.
“Se io ricerco una rottura creerò sempre una distanza. Quello che cerco non è una distanza, ma continuare un percorso, continuare un qualcosa che fa parte di noi.”
If I seek a rupture I will always create a distance. What I am looking for is not a distance, but to continue a path, to continue something that is part of us.
Daniele Fortuna, Interview, Deodato Arte, 2022
After Leonardo
Shortening the Distance
“I wanted to shorten the distance to 'sacred' art,” Fortuna says, “art that is in a sense intangible, unreachable.” No painting is harder to reach than the small portrait behind glass in the Louvre.
Monalisa (2023) brings Leonardo's sitter off the wall and into the round, more than two feet tall and painted in a single saturated blue.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
The smile, the most famous expression in painting, is here a matter of a few layers of wood.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Across the bodice he carves a pattern of scrolls of his own, not found in the painting.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Turn her and she becomes sculpture: the sitter Leonardo painted from one side now has a profile and a back.
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
“The original does not exist,” Fortuna says. “The artist copies or lets himself be influenced by another artist, and originality lies in making that language his own.”
After Ingres, 1814
An Odalisque in Wood
In 1814 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted La Grande Odalisque for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples: a nude reclining on silk, looking back over her shoulder, a peacock fan in her hand. Two centuries later Fortuna's version came to a gallery in another Naples.
La Grande Odalisque, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (2025) is four feet long and less than two feet high. Like Ingres's odalisque she lies along her couch with her back to us and turns her head to meet our eye.
In this image
Daniele Fortuna
La Grande Odalisque, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
2025, Painted Wood, 23 × 48 × 19 in
$18,000
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
The long curve of her back, the line at the heart of Ingres's painting, is drawn here by the layers of the wood.
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
At her wrist, a gold bracelet; in her hand, the gilded fan, set against a red cushion.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Pop classicism
Gods, Heroes and a Mouse
“If you look at the whole history of art,” Fortuna says, “there has always been a remaking of something that already existed before.” His cast runs from Venus, Zeus and David to Batman, Mickey Mouse and the artists of pop.
Mickey (2022) stands fifty inches tall in red: the world's most famous mouse, born in 1928, given the treatment of a Greek god. Layer upon layer, the cartoon becomes a statue.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Seen close, the ears are discs of stacked wood and the famous grin is drawn by the steps between the layers.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Throughout his work, Fortuna reimagines art history from Mondrian and Keith Haring to Lucio Fontana. His small Thologiny totems, inspired by mythology, have also accompanied exhibitions of Munch in Milan and Botero in Rome.
What Time Does to a Sculpture
Parallel Histories
“I find it fascinating that the same sculpture can have parallel histories,” Fortuna says, “one defined by its subject and another by what it has lived through. I wonder what my sculptures will be like in 100 or 200 years, and how time will transform them.” — Daniele Fortuna
In Bust with Flowers the two histories meet in one figure. Half of the bust is the white of museum marble; over the other half, printed roses and violets climb from the shoulder into the hair, as if colour were growing back over the stone.
WHEN ART MEETS DESIGN
Aphrodite Venus reimagines the classical goddess within the architecture of a bookcase, entering into dialogue with Fabio Novembre’s celebrated functional design while transforming the idea through Fortuna’s signature layered wood and color.
Aphrodite Venus (2021) stands nearly seven feet tall: a Venus in hand-cut layers of white-painted wood, set into the shelves of a bookcase.
Daniele Fortuna
Aphrodite Venus
2021, Painted Wood, 81 1/2 × 47 1/4 × 29 3/4 in
$26,000
The work answers the Italian architect and designer Fabio Novembre’s Venus Bookcase, a design inspired by the wooden crates museums use to protect and transport classical sculpture. Novembre paired natural oak shelving with a Venus of recomposed marble and resin.
In this image
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Fortuna answers in his own material. The goddess is drawn, cut and stacked in layers of wood, and every step of her profile is a single sheet.
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
The shelves divide her as a crate would: head, torso, hips and legs each rest on their own level, and still the figure reads as one.
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Below the hips the drapery falls in stepped folds, every fold another sheet of wood.
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
Classical sculpture, contemporary art and design meet in a single object: the Venus of the museums, remade through wood, layering and fragmentation.
About this image
Aldo Castillo Gallery.
“Ho sempre creduto che sia importante riconoscere la 'verità' nei messaggi che provengono dal passato e voglio riaffermare e aggiornare questi messaggi attraverso un nuovo linguaggio visivo.”
I have always believed that it is important to recognize the 'truth' in messages that come from the past and I want to reaffirm and update these messages through a new visual language.
Daniele Fortuna, Artist statement
Works from the gallery
EXPLORE AVAILABLE ARTWORKS
Collect
Daniele Fortuna Available For Acquisition
Daniele Fortuna
Nymph
2022, Painted Wood, 58 × 30 × 30 in
$28,000
With a note from Aldo
Daniele Fortuna
Aphrodite Venus
2021, Painted Wood, 81 1/2 × 47 1/4 × 29 3/4 in
$26,000
Daniele Fortuna
Monalisa
2023, Painted Wood, 27 1/2 × 20 × 17 in
$18,500
With a note from Aldo
Daniele Fortuna
La Grande Odalisque, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
2025, Painted Wood, 23 × 48 × 19 in
$18,000
With a note from Aldo
Daniele Fortuna
Bust with Flowers
2023, Painted Wood, 28 × 21 × 14 in
$12,500
With a note from Aldo
Daniele Fortuna
Mickey
2022, Painted Wood, 50 × 30 × 30 in
$18,500
With a note from Aldo
In person
See Them in Person
Arrange a Private Viewing in Naples, or ask about any work you have seen here.