Norma - Studi su Boldini

About

Galleria Marcolini hosts Norma – Studi su Boldini by Silvia Camporesi (Forlì, 73), an exhibition comprising new works in dialogue with “Boldini. Lo Spettacolo della Modernità”, which is on at Musei San Domenico, Forlì until 14 June 2015.

Norma is a photographic interpretation of the Ferrara-born painter’s practice. It has been possible with the co-operation of both the artist and the gallery, interested in developing an iconographic work on Boldini’s paintings and drawings.

In the gallery square room, Camporesi shows a 2009 series inspired by three paintings by Boldini: La cornice dorata (approx. 1889), Nudo di schiena (approx. 1895) and La contessa de Leusse (approx. 1889). Camporesi interprets these works dramatizing their colours and pictorial signs. She enhances hues, the walls’ red, Norma’s pink skin (Norma is her model’s name), but also the vertical and sharp lines of Boldini’s brush, whilst reflecting rather dark, long and narrow strokes on her pictures’ walls.

The kimono worn by Norma, whom the exhibition is titled after, is an homage to Japan, and also the connection element between the gallery square room and the corridor, where visitors can observe a proper celebration of the Land of the Rising Sun. In the triptych on the left wall, the Japanese writing is used as performance, ritual and cultural metonymy, whereas the kirigami examples (kiri – to cut, kami – paper), interventions on images of fabric, give volume to the niche close to the courtyard. These works, together with the hand-coloured photos on the left wall, are new pieces.

Camporesi has been working with the hand-coloured technique for the last few years; this takes us back to Japan, where this practice developed in the Nineteenth Century, and became very popular thanks also to the work of the Italian-British photographer Felice Beato.

Norma is a hermeneutical exercise; the project compares two arts, photography and painting, and re-identifies their relation, starting from the empathic synergy between the artist and her model.

This is the first collaboration between Galleria Marcolini and a local artist as successful as Silvia Camporesi. Born in Forlì, Camporesi has developed an international profile and public.