Martina Cassatella

Martina Cassatella's poetic universe reveals itself through light and gesture as a primordial form and initiatory journey, evoking a sort of lost world that resurfaces in memory. Hands that shield the sunlight, that gather among sparkling filaments or guard flashes of light, populate silent atmospheres, as if they were magical microcosms dense with energy. In the work in competition, entitled Il sole (alba) (The Sun (Dawn)), a pair of hands occupies the entire pictorial surface in the act of filtering sunlight through twilight colours, which shift from periwinkle blue tones to the pink and orange hues typical of dawn. The hands are raised upwards to protect the gaze from the increasing intensity of the light. But the view is overwhelmed by the dazzling glare. “Looking at the sun is a sweet and at the same time tragic act: its energy forces us to shield ourselves,” comments Cassatella. 'And it is precisely through that veil formed by half-open fingers, as we did as children, that we allow ourselves to be amazed by the wonder, letting the light pass through our hands and half-closed eyelids'. It is, in fact, a dazzling encounter, in which an instinctive gesture becomes the arcane curtain between the mystery of night and the dawn, the unknown and the visible world.

Arianna Baldoni