The Diary of a Neurotic – Anatomy of a Fragmented Self
by Carlo Borloni
A diary that refuses to reassure
The Diary of a Neurotic presents itself as an archive of doodles, sketches, and visual notes born out of impulsive instinct. But this apparent spontaneity is only the surface layer. Each mark contains an inner tension: the attempt to give form to something that resists form.
The traditional diary organizes, records, simplifies.
This diary destabilizes.
Its pages seem to breathe, oscillate, falter. The line does not define; it tremors. The figure does not solidify; it dissolves. Every artwork captures a mental instant in which thought is not yet language and emotion has not yet become nameable.
This is where the strength of the project lies: in its refusal to domesticate complexity.
The artist does not translate chaos. She shows it while it happens.

Get out of my glass, Mariah
Between human and posthuman: mediated emotions, processed identity
We inhabit an era in which the mind is no longer a private territory. Our emotions are shaped, amplified, or muted by external structures: algorithms, media ecosystems, devices that anticipate what we will feel before we feel it.
The artist grasps this anthropological shift with rare clarity.
In her images, the self is not stable. It is a process. A continually updating flow.
The physical gesture of the doodle, rooted in graphite and pigment, is then transposed into the digital realm, where it encounters another ecosystem, another language, another temperature. This transition becomes the conceptual heart of the collection: a negotiation between the tangible and the virtual, between what arises from the body and what is mediated by technological systems.
It is a form of posthumanism experienced not as theory, but as emotional condition.
Neurosis, anxiety, fragility do not emerge as diagnoses, but as survival strategies.
The neurotic mind becomes a metronome of chaos, an instrument attempting to synchronize itself with forces larger than its own architecture.

Neurotic dreams, Mariah
Art as symptom
To look at these works is to witness the psyche attempting to inhabit its own time without fully recognizing it. These images do not seek to be understood, but to be listened to.
Each piece is a symptom of something unspeakable:
a face dissolving like compressed memory,
a body searching for a boundary but finding only pixels,
a tangle of lines reminiscent of a machine’s impatient handwriting.
The remarkable element is not analysis, but vulnerability.
The collection does not try to explain the world.
It shows what happens inside when the world ceases to offer a place to rest.

Surrender control, Mariah
The body as counter-memory
The decision to start from physical gesture is far from casual.
In an era dominated by digital acceleration, the mark made by hand becomes an act of resistance.
It is as if each page of the diary whispered:
“I remain material even as I migrate into the system.”
The tension between corporeality and dematerialization creates a fertile paradox: the digital does not erase presence; it magnifies it. The fragility of the line becomes even more pronounced in translation, as though the digital were a magnifying lens revealing the vulnerability embedded in the gesture.
The collection then reveals a second nature:
not merely a diary, but an emotional autopsy.
A study on how the psyche attempts to reorganize what overwhelms it.

Scammer, Mariah
A suspended question
The editorial heart of the collection can be condensed into a single, quiet question that pulses beneath the surface of every work:
What remains of identity when identity is no longer a boundary but a perpetually rewritten flow?
There is no definitive answer, and the artist does not pretend to offer one.
What she stages is a liminal space, a threshold between memory and oblivion, order and improvisation, the human and the system.
It is a diary written by a mind that knows it is no longer alone within itself, aware that its internal space is shared with opaque forces, technological structures, and collective memories that cross it without permission.

What could’ve been, Mariah
The beauty of the fracture
The Diary of a Neurotic is not a collection to be observed.
It is a collection to be traversed.
Its value lies not in form, but fracture. Not in gesture, but in the vibration that precedes it. Not in the completed thought, but in the hesitating one.
In an era demanding performance, coherence, stability, this collection celebrates something radically different: the possibility of not being whole. The possibility of narrating oneself not through the ideal image, but through perceptual failures, deviations, excesses.
It is an invitation to recognize the beauty of the fragment.
The power of the fissure.
The poetry of imperfection.
And among all the questions that inhabit these trembling pages, perhaps one deserves to accompany the viewer beyond the diary’s threshold:
Perhaps the goal is not to heal our disorder.
Perhaps the goal is to learn how to read it.

Neurotic kiss, Mariah
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