Artist, Catskills, Gilbertsville, NY, USA

We drove two hours north from New York, dragging the whole family along. Simone welcomed us into his Gilbertsville home, cooking a generous lunch with his wife, Zena Gurbo — also an artist ( Instagram) — while their daughter kept Santo company among the cats and the endless curiosities of a house that doubles as studio. It felt less like a shoot and more like catching up with old friends. These are the moments I value most in Where They Create: when the work and the life fold together, and I’m invited into that space.

Florence-born artist Simone Mantellassi has made his home in the quiet of upstate New York, far from the city but close to the rhythms that shape his practice. His work moves between drawing and sculpture, comic and tragic, order and collapse. Mantellassi’s imagery often hovers in states of becoming — half-formed figures, structures that reveal both stage and backstage, narratives that loop without resolution.

In Gilbertsville, he builds small dioramas and fragile worlds from everyday materials, keeping the seams and rough edges visible. What interests him is not polish but process, the unfinished, the absurd. His drawings, precise yet dissolving, explore the tension between clarity and dissolution — the moment where desire meets failure.

Living among the rolling Catskills, Mantellassi embraces the unfinished as both subject and method. His work is less about closure than about staying in the in-between: the quiet, tender space where things are broken, imperfect, and deeply human.

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