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Working mostly out of Leonardo Da Vinci's old studio in a castle in the hills of Tuscany, artistic duo DORMICE © have been painting the world's most famous and beautiful women in Italy for more than a decade. They are extremely prolific and anyone who is anyone in Italy has bought their pieces, so much so that they have sold every single work they have made in the last decade.

They are a truly unique pair of artists. They play with the images that surround them everyday, messing with the world's pictorial consciousness. Heinrich, a well known abstract expressionist from the 1980s, throws colours onto the canvas while Sawan paints the models onto the background that Heinrich has created, and then when Sawan is finished Heinrich returns to emblazon the paintings with text, such as "Let's Beat up the Poor" or "Fuck You Too, Absolutely No Small Paintings."

Inhabiting the achingly cool Italian fashion scene means DORMICE © get to collaborate with the likes of Roberto Cavalli, who sends them clothes to dress their models, and Santo Versace, who often asks them to do art directing work for him.

Courting controversy, Dormice are constantly threatened with lawsuits because of their blatant copying from fashion magazines, but it seems that nothing can stop this dynamic duo from expressing themselves.

"We don't want to defend ourselves against any risk - in fact, we're looking for collective risk. Art is a spiritual experience, an apparition. It has led us to work together, anything else is unthinkable for us."

Artist's Statement from the DORMICE © manifesto:

Every coloured space and every line that is painted on the empty canvas tightens the possible decisions, and as more of the composition grows, the less possibilities to interact with the painting remain. This is more or less the core of the traditional academic way of dealing with the composition of a painting. Whoever wants to make a painting that works, seems to have to follow these rules.

Today it is necessary to ignore those rules. Breaking rules demands BALANCE. If you want to break the rules, you have to deal with everything and with nothing. Nothing is the moment that does not exist, when the painter applies colour on the canvas. In this moment the only thing that exists is the emptiness.

Emptiness is everything based on the present, on the here and now. We don't look back and they don't look in the future, because we are just here, like animals, living the moment.

The strategy of Painting is the composition. We deal with it like musicians: there is a melody, a rhythm and an atmosphere, all put together makes the "glow", the secret of a painting. Painting together means respect, discipline and awareness. It makes you responsible the interconnection between yourself and the other.