Donne di Colore

Torre dei Lambardi, Magione

Women of ColourCurated by Giorgio de Finis Until 24 September 2017, Torre dei Lambardi, Magione (Pg)

Works by: Francesca Fini, Lenia Georgiou, Maya Hayuk, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Micaela Lattanzio, Florencia Martinez, Veronica Montanino, Francesca Pasquali, Gloria Petyarre, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Virginia Ryan, Joana Vasconcelos, Mary Zygoury.

Nucleo, Micaela Lattanzio

Venere degli stracci, Michelangelo Pistoletto

Francesca Pasquali

Florencia Martinez

Opere di: Francesca Fini, Lenia Georgiou, Maya Hayuk, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Micaela Lattanzio, Florenci

Francesca Pasquali

Kaarina Kaikkonen

Colour as language and affirmation

As de Finis recalls, the exhibition was conceived as a response to an ancient cultural narrative that sought to confine colour, and with it the feminine, to a sphere of emotion, ornament and seduction, arbitrarily separating it from the rigour of thought and intellectual depth. For centuries, philosophers and poets projected onto colour their own fears of the sensory and of the body, describing it as chaos, excess or disorder. Plato associated it with the sensible world and with the feminine principle, feared because it could not be controlled. Baudelaire relegated it to the childish and the “savage”. Charles Blanc reduced it to a force that “stirs the heart”, opposing it to drawing, presumed domain of the mind.

The exhibition overturns this perspective. Colour is no longer deception but a form of sensitive knowledge, an instrument of freedom, a fertile ground where emotion and intellect merge.

Twelve artists, twelve visions of the world

Around Pistoletto’s Venus unfolds a constellation of female voices from across the globe: Francesca Fini, Lenia Georgiou, Maya Hayuk, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Micaela Lattanzio, Florencia Martinez, Veronica Montanino, Francesca Pasquali, Gloria Petyarre, Virginia Ryan, Joana Vasconcelos and Mary Zygouri.

Their works intertwine installation, painting, fibre art, performance and digital languages, creating a path that traverses the body, memory, nature and the social dimension of art. What emerges is a collective narrative in which colour becomes political and poetic gesture, an energy that unites differences and affirms the generative power of the feminine.

The Venus of the Rags: a symbol in dialogue with the present

At the centre of the exhibition stands Michelangelo Pistoletto’s renowned “Venus of the Rags”, an icon of Arte Povera. The classical, white and immobile figure rises before a mountain of multicoloured fabrics, a direct confrontation between order and chaos, the eternal and the mutable, the white and the kaleidoscopic. The work becomes a manifesto and metaphor for the entire exhibition: colour as living matter, as plural and inclusive reality, as a stratification of histories and identities.