AYA TAKANO

Painter, illustrator, science fiction essayist, and manga artist, AYA TAKANO has created a highly personal universe composed of infinite worlds, each serving as a means to escape reality and gravity and its constraints, to achieve a form of transcendence.

AYA TAKANO’s Happy and joyous days, a permanent work created for the Palazzo Diedo bookshop, is a ceiling painting made using the ancient fresco a giornate technique, taking its inspiration from Venice, the city of water. Unlike traditional frescoes that usually depict gods, angels, or dragons observing us from above, TAKANO’s piece flips the perspective: the viewer gazing upward finds themselves completely immersed in the Venetian sea, where a manga-style mermaid floats on the surface with a Venetian Lion and sea creatures, along with a copy of the book The Merchant of Venice adrift nearby.