Pulse emerges from the same bare linen that grounded Flow, but arrives at a different reckoning. Where Flow moved in one unbroken current — effortless, unified — Pulse is animated by tension. Bold, spontaneous marks — splattered, poured, driven across the canvas in a single decisive stroke — meet the exquisitely rendered, striated forms that have become Pera's signature language. Neither side dominates. They speak to one another, push against one another, and ultimately evolve from one another: the raw gesture informing the refined form, the controlled giving something freer permission to emerge.
Each painting holds two truths at once. The force of the mark and the patience of the image. A breath and a week. Rather than resolving this tension, Pera inhabits it — finding in that charged, in-between space something that feels like a heartbeat: irregular, vital, alive.
The series spans a range of emotional registers — from the intimate and sensual to the explosive and expansive — but remains unified by this central poetic: that beauty lives not in the resolution of opposites, but in the tension between them.
Flow moves between abstraction and intimate surrealism — organic forms that seem to drift, suspend, and breathe within the bare linen ground. The interplay of warm and cool pulls the eye inward, each canvas opening into something felt rather than named: a mood, a memory, a question about the nature of things.
Pera is drawn to the movement just before a form becomes itself — painting the instant before water finds its course, before light settles on a surface and decides what colour it will be. The linen is left untouched where the composition allows — its raw texture and natural warmth becoming part of the work itself, not its backdrop.
These are paintings that ask to be stood in front of. Slowly.
Special Project · Nepal Residency
For three months, Caroline Pera lived inside a Nepalese orphanage — not as a visitor, but as part of the household.
I painted their faces with the same precision that comes with love and attention — every feature considered, every shadow earned. Then I handed them the brush and stepped back.
They picked their own materials. Pure pigment from Nepal — the same pigments used to paint their faces and bodies in ceremony and ritual — and with them they painted themselves larger than I had made them.
They gave themselves wings, bodies that filled the whole canvas, colours that had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with truth. A two-year-old child, Sanchita, painted herself in yellow — great sweeping arcs of yellow — surrounding her own face like a force field, like light, like something that could not be contained.
Pera self-organised the exhibition in an abandoned historical children's cinema in central Milan. The paintings lined the room; a film of the children was projected live onto an installation at its heart. The show later travelled to Artifact Gallery, Manhattan.
A photography series from the Shiva Festival, Kathmandu.
About the Artist
Her work moves between the deeply interior and the expansively gestural — from the meditative oils on bare linen of the Flow and Pulse series, to the profoundly human Painted Identity project, born from a three-month residency inside a Nepalese orphanage.
Flow — inspired by Lao Tzu's philosophy of effortless becoming — has become her most celebrated series. Pulse, her most recent body of work, pushes further: raw gesture meets exquisitely rendered form, held in a tension that is both confrontational and tender.
Works held in the private collections of Etro, Loro Piana, and financier Claudio Costamagna. Exhibited internationally across Milan, London, Vienna, New York, and Birmingham.
Contact
For acquisition enquiries, exhibition proposals, or press — please reach out directly. Caroline responds to all enquiries personally.
Caroline undertakes select commissions by arrangement.
+39 340 631 1365
Milan, Italy
Complete Collection · 12 Works
Exhibition view · Cinema Arti · Milan
