DREAMING IN COLOR

Artist Julie Polidoro employs bold hues with intention, both on the canvas and in her Roman hilltop apartment.

- Marella Caracciolo

The artist Julie Polidoro deconstructs notions of identity and place in the wide variety of works she creates from vast, unstretched canvases to collages, drawings, textiles, and sculpture. But no matter the medium, each of her pieces has a throughline: a reverberating sense of space. "In art, as in life, emptiness is powerfully evocative," she says.

Her home, an airy apartment perched like an eagle's nest at the top of Rome's Janiculum hill, bears testimony to her interest in positive and negative space. The furnishings here are as ethereal as the luminescent daylight, and every room is defined by the artist's experimental use of color.

A child of the 1970s, Polidoro was born in France but for the most part grew up in Rome, her family's home. As a young adult, she hopped from continent to continent-first for her studies, which took her to New York and Paris, then to Hong Kong, where she received a UNESCO scholarship to teach painting. Nine years ago, she and her teenage daughter, Nina, moved from Paris to Rome to be closer to family.