Flights of Love: The Architecture of Emotion
Angelina Mirabito X Mark Alexander
Flights of Love, 2025, is a series of six paintings born from ascent; architectural, emotional, and spiritual. Developed through the dialogue between artist Angelina Mirabito and highly respected Australian luxury interior designer and bespoke furniture maker, Mark Alexander, the project explores how architecture and emotion can intersect through light, texture, and form. Inspired by the elegant staircases stunning flow and shifting perspectives inherent to a staircase, the six works reflect the way love and perception evolve through movement and height, from foundation to flight.
The series bridges painting, design, and contemporary art practice. Each work captures a moment within an ascent: an unfolding of emotion rendered through layered materiality, shifting light, and intuitive mark-making. Together, they reveal how the structures that hold us, emotional or architectural, can become vessels of transformation.
The works are both tactile and ethereal, grounded in the physicality of paint yet gesturing toward luminosity and transcendence. Their atmosphere is inspired by Santo Botticelli’s Birth of Venus: that balance between sensuality and serenity, movement and stillness, where beauty becomes both subject and structure.
The Series
Each painting in Flights of Love marks a stage within this emotional and architectural journey:
Where the Heart Opens: the first unfurling of love, soft pinks and greens opening like a shell revealing its pearl.
Flow Within the Flight: textured burgundies and golds speak to strength within motion and the feeling of belonging.
The Hidden Curve: a meditation on trust and the unseen turn, where creation becomes a dance between control and surrender.
Stepping into Light: curves and iridescence in dialogue, recalling the grace and luminosity of Venus.
A Pause to Remember: love suspended in stillness, the dove poised before flight.
The Summit of the Heart: an expansive vista of openness, celebrating the culmination of beauty and transformation.
Viewed sequentially, the series traces an emotional architecture, a pathway that bends, pauses, and ascends toward light.
Collaboration and Craft
Flights of Love exemplifies a collaborative approach to contemporary art.
Mark Alexander, a bespoke furniture maker and luxury interior designer, contributed the concept design for the texture base and colours. His contributions included the proportions, sightlines, and physical foundations from which the project evolved via a constant feedback loop. I responded through colour, texture, and gestural abstraction, translating those frameworks into emotional and painterly language.
The process became a conversation between structure and sensitivity, precision and intuition, resting within the tension between intention and instinct until it transcended into a space beyond both, yet integral to each. Each work is constructed on aluminium, merging durability with a lightness of feeling despite their substantial physical weight and dense texture. This interplay of material and perception mirrors the conceptual duality at the heart of the project, where contrasts co-exist and transform through the act of creation.
Venus and the Crystalline Heart
Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486). Temera on canvas. 172.5 cm × 278.9 cm
The spirit of Botticelli’s Venus remained a conceptual anchor throughout: a symbol of emergence, luminosity, and the courage to embody beauty. The palette of soft pinks, golds, greens, blues, and pearlescents , extends this influence into a contemporary idiom of light and material resonance.
Each work is also paired with crystals selected for chromatic and energetic harmony, furthering the project’s exploration of how emotional and aesthetic energies can coexist in form.
A Journey Toward the Heart’s Summit
Ultimately, Flights of Love is a study in how art, design, and emotion can converge to create an experience of ascent. It considers beauty as both architecture and atmosphere, a space we build within ourselves, and through which we rise.
The series stands as an embodiment of collaboration, material intelligence, and conceptual clarity, a meditation on love as both foundation and flight.
Project Information
Medium: Mixed media on aluminium
Year: 2025
Format: Six-piece series (2 x 180cm x 180cm x 5cm, 2 x 170cm x 130cm x 5cm, 170cm x 170 x 5cm, 145cm x 180cm x 5 cm)
Materials: Professional-grade texture, acrylics, mediums, architectural aluminium frame, Belgian linen
Collaborator: Mark Alexander (architectural framework, design concept, curation)
Artist: Angelina Mirabito (painting, conceptual development)