Alessandra Ariatti, painter: 'People no longer have the time to sit for portraits'

Driving to the Italian base of Alessandra Ariatti you head out of the small city of Reggio Emilia to the hamlet of Bosco di Scandiano. Ariatti's studio is next to her parents' home, upstairs in a late-19th-century building previously used for storing agricultural tools for the family business. The brick steps to the door are worn by the passage of many feet.

I am here following the opening of Ariatti's show Legami at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia. It is a celebratory event, with some of the sitters posing for photos next to their portraits. At first glance, they appear to be simple photo-realism portraits, but upon close inspection they reveal aspects of the sitters: what Ariatti calls their "moral virtues".

After a quick inspection of the simple, spotlessly clean room in which she works, with her easel, magnifying glass and painting table drawn close to the window to capture the light, it's time for coffee, served to us by her mother.

The works start with Ariatti photographing the subjects many times. They are often people she has known for some time, she explains. She then chooses out of the many photographs the ones that illustrate something about "their inner beings".

Ariatti, born in Reggio Emilia in 1967, studied in Urbino for four years, but she always liked drawing, crediting an aunt who gave her a colouring book when she was six, with starting her off. At art college, "I was never encouraged, but I always knew I wanted to draw from models. I never wanted to make installations."

Bosco di Scandiano is a long way from the 50th Venice Biennale of 2003 where Ariatti was included in a selection of painters by Massimiliano Gioni. She smiles at the recollection. At the time she was a supply teacher, only painting part time, and she received a call from Gioni to ask whether she would be interested in participating. "I said, 'Yes, of course!' And he paid me a studio visit."

Luigi Maramotti of the Collezione Maramotti then commissioned her to paint the three large portraits in the current show. It took her four years. I ask if she ever invites the subjects to come and sit in the flesh. "No, people no longer have the time to sit," she says. "I need photos in order to communicate what I want. It is a matter of credibility."

Her portrait of a mother and her two young children particularly catches my imagination. The mother has the solidity of Rembrandt's Juno, and reveals, like Chantal Joffe's portraits nearby, something of the sitters that they do not know themselves.

On the easel today is an unfinished portrait of her local priest who died recently, paid for by her local church. She tells me she often paints commissioned portraits of dead family members: one woman asked her to make one of her daughter who had died in an accident. "She tells me that she often speaks to the portrait."

Ritratto di Donne: Chantal Joffe and Alessandra Ariatti continues at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (collezionemaramotti.org) to 12 April