Davide Puma moves elegantly and with sophistication between naturalistic and idealistic painting styles, as if he were drawing the complexity of our world with his brush. A world in which the wild and the civilised merge indissolubly.

Davide Puma. An artist with the name of a cat. Cats have always been considered wilful, freedom-loving and independent: elegant creatures that love attention and enchant with their subtle aura. Probably their most famous representative? Karl Lagerfeld’s Choupette, the elegant muse of the fashion world. As a partner of AC Milan, Puma, the shy cat, stands for innovation and leaves its mark not only on the pitch but also characterises the spirit of sport with elegance, passion and avant-garde aspirations. But cats also have a firm place in art, from ancient hieroglyphics to modern pop art works.

In Bordighera, we had the opportunity to spend a quiet moment with Davide. An artist whose work seems like a silent universe. His studio, bathed in cheerful, natural colours, radiates a deep calm that invites the viewer to reflect. Age, gender and origin play no role here; his works are like windows to a hidden reality in which animals appear not just as props, but as living symbols of our dreams and identities.

With a skilful balance between naturalistic details and idealistic visions, Puma invites you to see the world with new eyes. He explores and portrays a variety of subjects: Animals, people, religious figures, mythological creatures and surreal metamorphoses. His art dissolves the boundaries between wildness and bourgeois order and creates a fascinating world. Puma plays with allegories in which animals carry social and cultural meanings that are deeply rooted in our collective consciousness.

His animal figures are more than mere motifs; they reflect our human identity, they are intersections of different patterns of origin and fantasy that raise questions of belonging, power and norms. Reflection on the nature of the human being is at the centre of his art.

Your works move in a fascinating fantasy world between wildness and bourgeois order. How do you manage to stage this tension in such an aesthetically beautiful way? Does this balance have any significance for your artistic statement?

This wildness, as you affectionately call it, is the direction I have been giving my painting for many years. I try to move away from the mere illustration of subjects: I want to go beyond mere visual representation, even if the line between illustration and interpretation is sometimes thin. Nature, to be truly expressed, needs a representation that goes beyond the figurative and borders on the informal and sometimes the abstract.

When I take on a particular subject, be it an animal or a human figure, I start with the construction and look for a personal interpretive key from the beginning that will give the work a unique voice. It’s a constant search for balance, an inner harmony: if I don’t find it, I feel it physically, on a visceral level. It’s a discomfort that drives me to return to the work, to pick it up again until I can give it back the coherence and authenticity I’m looking for.

Which artists, whether literary, painterly or cinematic, inspire you?

I feel inhabited by so many masters who come from different expressive arts. Over the years I have absorbed so much from them that today, at this stage of my life, I feel a deep need to pass something on rather than assimilate it. The inspirations I seek now are spiritual in nature, more internal than external.

The list of influences would be long, but I can name a few. Leonardo da Vinci was perhaps the first: a constant reference. Rembrandt, especially with The Night Watch, a work that has fascinated me since childhood, when I discovered it between the pages of a book in the library of my house. Felice Casorati has always impressed me with his floating, metaphysical atmospheres, in which the female figures seem to breathe an echo of the Renaissance, especially that of Piero della Francesca. Renzo Vespignani influenced me through the power of his drawing and a visual language that I still find incredibly relevant today. Then there are Klimt, Schiele, Basquiat and Schifano, who are present in my dialogue with colour on a daily basis.

Literature also played a fundamental role, especially in the early years of my life: crucial years for the formation of thought and imagination. I owe a lot to writers like Jules Verne, Jean-Paul Sartre, Agatha Christie and Richard Bach, who encouraged my inner world and my way of seeing things.

In your art, you integrate characters that oscillate between the human and the animal. What fascinates you about these border crossings? Do you want to convey a message?

When I began to depict these metamorphic figures in my painting, I saw the opening up of a new narrative world, a new space for my poetics. In particular, the figure of the centaur – or rather, the centaura – became for me a means of expressing the balance between feminine and masculine energy: the primal power of the animal merges with the gentleness and sensitivity of the feminine.

I feel drawn to border areas, to places where identities mix, question each other and create tensions, but also new harmonies. That’s where I find space for my imagination. In this universe that takes shape in my works, these creatures live in peace with their hybrid nature: they have already undergone and overcome the suffering of metamorphosis.

The beings that populate this world – humans, animals, plants – are deeply interconnected. There is no separation between what is human and what is natural: everything coexists in a subtle balance made of listening, respect and a fragile but powerful beauty.

Your work questions the boundaries of beauty and the ideal in art. How do you see the role of animal motifs in this context?

I don’t feel that I am questioning what is already established in painting; rather, I see my work as a personal contribution that complements what already exists. My training and my visual language are the result of a long period of study and a deep passion for art history. In each of my works, I feel the presence of a living dialogue with everything that came before me.

An emblematic example of this is the way in which my animals take on characteristics reminiscent of the medieval bestiary, without my having consciously intended this at first, and thus resonate with representations dating back some eight hundred years. I believe that this happens when you are truly connected to what you are creating: the artistic act not only projects itself into the future, but also reverberates in the past, as if awakening old memories that resurface through the imagination.

What are your plans for the future? What projects would you like to realise in the coming months?

There are several projects in the pipeline, but I prefer not to go into detail at the moment. However, I can foresee that this summer I will be presenting an exhibition dedicated to the small format. This is a great challenge for me, as I am used to working mainly on large canvases. However, I feel the desire to embrace it and explore new ways of expression. I believe that the small format can offer a more intimate space where I can experiment with different languages, but always in dialogue with my poetic universe.

Thank you for the stimulating conversation! It was a real pleasure to immerse myself in your world of ideas.

If you would like to take a look at his studio in Bordighera, we recommend a stop in Ventimiglia. It was here that Puma created the painting of St Thomas of Reggio, which is on permanent display in Ventimiglia Cathedral. In recent years, he has presented his works in international solo exhibitions and art fairs in Europe and the United States. Since 2013, his works have been part of the permanent collection of the MACS Museum in Sicily.

To make an uncomplicated and effortless appointment with Davide, you can contact him via email . You can also find him on Instagram.

All photographs and images courtesy and © Davide Puma