Italian artist Marica Fasoli paints children sitting, playing and daydreaming inside cardboard boxes, and the boxes are not a backdrop she photographed and copied. Each canvas is cut and mounted so the corrugated walls, torn flaps and curling strips of "Fragile" tape physically project out from the wall, while the child inside is rendered in a hyperrealist technique detailed enough to read as skin, hair and fabric rather than paint.
Portraits built from a shaped canvas, not a flat one
Fasoli calls the series 3Dipinti, paintings that behave like small stage sets. The support is not a rectangle: it is shaped to the silhouette of an open box, mounted proud of the wall so the corners, flaps and torn cardboard edges cast real shadows the way an actual package would. Only once that physical structure is built does she paint the surface, matching the trompe l'oeil grain of corrugated cardboard, the shine of packing tape and the soft creases of worn paper to what a shipped, handled box actually looks like.
The child sitting inside gets the same level of attention as the box around them. Skin, hair and clothing are rendered with the same hyperrealist precision, so the illusion holds at close range instead of only working from across a gallery.
A technique she carried over from restoring old paintings
Fasoli, born in Bussolengo, Italy, in 1977, trained first in art conservation and restoration, working on paintings, canvases and historic frescoes before shifting toward her own practice in the early 2000s. That background shows in how deliberately each surface is built up: the cardboard's fibrous texture, the slight discoloration where tape has been peeled and reapplied, the way light catches a torn edge differently than a clean one. It is the same close observation restoration work demands, redirected from repairing other people's paintings to constructing her own illusions from scratch.
Every child in the series gets a different emotional register
No two boxes hold the same mood. Some children sit quiet and self-contained, knees drawn up, eyes somewhere past the viewer. Others are mid-motion: a baby hauling itself up the cardboard wall, a girl caught turning to smell a daisy. A few wear costumes that push the scene toward fantasy, feathered wings sprouting from a child's back as though the box were a place things could transform rather than just a container.
Stuffed animals and pets do the storytelling
Fasoli repeats a small set of props across the series: a plush teddy bear, a sleeping puppy, a cat held against a patterned dress, a single loose flower. None of it is explained, and none needs to be. A girl hugging a dog to her chest or clutching a bear against her knees tells you what the box means to her without a caption, the same way a child's real bedroom fills up with objects that only make sense to the person who chose them.
Kimono, fan and floral dress widen the series beyond one setting
A run of paintings dresses its subjects in kimono and carries a folding fan, moving the series out of a single cultural register and suggesting the box can hold any child, staged any way Fasoli chooses. The cardboard stays constant. What changes is who is sitting inside it and what they are wearing, which keeps a growing, individually titled series from reading as one repeated formula.
Framed, the paintings become sculptural at the same time
Because each canvas is mounted proud of the wall, the pieces read differently in a gallery than they do in a photograph. Installed in a row, the boxes cast their own shadows and occupy real depth, so the space in front of them functions less like a picture wall and more like a shelf of open packages, each one holding a child rather than an object.
Marica Fasoli's 3Dipinti series is ongoing, and the paintings shown here are a selection from it. The photo below, from the artist's own gallery, shows several of the box paintings installed together, making the physical projection off the wall clear in a way no single frame can. More of her work, including the series in full, is on Marica Fasoli's website.
