Laura Pretto Vargas is an Italo-Brazilian abstract artist based in Miami, working fluidly between Miami and Milan. Her practice is rooted in an intuitive exploration of color, texture, and movement, where painting becomes a space of sensation rather than representation. Through layered pigment and gestural marks, she constructs emotional environments that invite the viewer into a deeply physical and psychological experience.
An Artistic Identity Shaped by Movement and Duality
Living and working between different cultural landscapes has played a central role in shaping Laura Pretto Vargas’s artistic identity. The dialogue between Brazil’s expressive vitality, Italy’s historical depth, and Miami’s contemporary energy is not translated into literal imagery, but instead absorbed into her approach to abstraction. Her work reflects a continuous state of transition, mirroring the experience of existing between places, languages, and emotional states.
Rather than depicting external geography, Laura focuses on internal terrains. Her paintings are spaces where memory, sensation, and intuition intersect. This sense of in-betweenness gives her work a quiet tension, an oscillation between softness and intensity, control and release, that remains central to her visual language.
From Fashion to Fine Arts: A Multidisciplinary Foundation
Laura Pretto Vargas’s formal education bridges fashion and fine art, a combination that deeply informs her sensitivity to surface, layering, and rhythm. She studied Fashion Design at Istituto Marangoni Milano, where she developed an acute awareness of material, structure, and movement. This background trained her eye to think in terms of texture, flow, and composition, elements that later became essential to her painting practice.
She went on to study Fine Arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, an institution known for its rigorous engagement with both classical and contemporary artistic thought. Here, Laura refined her conceptual approach and deepened her understanding of abstraction as a language capable of expressing complex emotional states beyond narrative or form.
Her apprenticeship at Atelier Lou Borghetti in Brazil further grounded her practice in hands-on experimentation and material exploration. This period allowed her to develop a more instinctive relationship with paint, embracing process, imperfection, and physical engagement with the canvas.
Painting as Sensation and Emotional Space
At the core of Laura Pretto Vargas’s work is the belief that color is not merely visual, but sensory. She treats color as an active force capable of evoking memory, emotion, and bodily response. Working with acrylic, oil, and mixed media, she builds layered surfaces that feel alive, as though they are breathing, shifting, and responding to the viewer’s presence.
Her paintings resist fixed interpretation. Instead of offering a single focal point, they unfold gradually, revealing subtle changes in tone, density, and movement. The surface becomes a site of continuous transformation, where gestures dissolve and re-emerge, and where depth is suggested through transparency and accumulation rather than illusionistic space.
This approach allows her work to function as an intimate threshold between the body and something vast, between inner rhythm and expansive infinity. The viewer is not positioned as an observer, but as a participant, invited to feel rather than decode.
The Language of Gesture and Texture
Gesture plays a vital role in Laura Pretto Vargas’s visual vocabulary. Her marks are not spontaneous in a chaotic sense, but guided by an internal rhythm that balances intention and intuition. Each movement leaves a trace, contributing to a layered dialogue between past and present actions on the canvas.
Texture becomes a carrier of time. Thick passages of paint coexist with thinner, more translucent areas, creating a sense of erosion and renewal. This physicality reinforces the idea that her paintings are not static images, but evolving environments shaped by accumulation, pressure, and release.
The result is a tension between tenderness and eruption. Soft tonal fields may suddenly give way to intense, saturated passages, echoing emotional shifts that are familiar yet difficult to articulate. It is within this tension that her work finds its resonance.
Spazio che pulsa: Abstraction as a Living Environment
Spazio che pulsa exemplifies Laura Pretto Vargas’s approach to abstraction as a living, breathing space. The work presents a dynamic field shaped by rhythm, intensity, and sensation rather than physical or representational reference. It does not describe a place, but rather evokes a state of being.
Saturated reds dominate the composition, pressing forward with a sense of heat, urgency, and embodied memory. These intense passages feel visceral, as if they carry emotional weight stored within the body. In contrast, softer violets and pale tonalities open moments of pause and reflection, allowing the surface to breathe.
The painting’s layered structure creates a constant sense of movement. Forms shift, dissolve, and re-emerge, suggesting an interior landscape that is never fixed. Presence and disappearance exist simultaneously, reinforcing the idea of painting as a process of becoming rather than resolution.
Spazio che pulsa invites the viewer into an immersive experience, one that is felt before it is understood. The work functions as a pulse, a rhythm that echoes the inner tempo of human emotion and perception.
Between Body and Infinity
Laura Pretto Vargas’s paintings occupy a space where the physical and the intangible meet. Her work does not seek to explain or represent, but to open a space for transformation. By prioritizing sensation over structure and intuition over narrative, she allows abstraction to function as a deeply human language.
Her practice continues to evolve through movement, experimentation, and emotional inquiry. Working between Miami and Milan, she remains attuned to the shifting energies of her environments while staying anchored in an internal rhythm that guides her creative process.
Ultimately, Laura Pretto Vargas creates paintings that are not meant to be seen from a distance, but entered. They are spaces of intensity and quiet, memory and immediacy, thresholds where the viewer is invited to pause, feel, and momentarily dissolve into color, texture, and infinite inner space.
