Radical subtlety gives grandeur to form. Sironi teaches this in painting, where his figures replace description with the construction of a bare, powerful form. Synthesis is also the poetics of this surreal work by Antonella Iovino. A single portrait that stands out like a secular cathedral, white and firm in space. The androgynous and hieratic figure of a young adult, dressed in a transparent cloth and a corrective corset pulled from the bottom of an old trunk, faces the spectator. Restoring an atmosphere poised between normality and provocation, she intends to shock with an image that is both exciting and disturbing, poking the morbid side of the viewer.

Anima Ludens, thus the title of the photograph, does not belong to the fast art of our liquid times, does not follow the dynamics of fashions or trends, but rather history and with it groups and currents. Inserted in a classic tradition such as the portrait, Iovino focuses on feelings. She transubstantiates the idea of the past, of childhood evoked with the “let’s make that I was… and that you were”, in a creature whose forms emphasise the disturbing sense of naturalness and vitality. She defines curtains that, from a timeless and metaphysical space, full of disquieting ambiguities, open dreamily as in a children’s game, theatres of knaves, queens, knights and kings. Iovino’s work is an enigmatic story, devoid of an unambiguous and linear narrative, telling us probable tales of love and juggling, exploring infinite possibilities of the imagination. A fantasy world that helps us develop our imagination and nurture our dreams. [P. Casulli]

This photographic project, which I would define as very long-term, wants to consider, beyond social conventions and in parallel to the intense debate on gender identity that has developed in recent years, the true nature of the individual, not as male or female, as man or woman, but as the bearer of difference, of a sexuality of one’s own, intimately connected with one’s essence and certainly foreign to the collective classification that would like to enroll it, in the absence of acceptable correspondences, in the category of deviance or disease.

A socially accepted membership, according to the chrisms of a perfect society, a Celeste Jerusalem bearer of sanctity and blessing, responds to processes of adaptation, closely linked to ideological, political, religious, cultural and social contexts. It is therefore subjected to automatic forcing and conditioning of the relationship in everyday practice, with the attribution of roles, through a coercive action of acquiring the sexual stereotype.

The images, deliberately provocative and at times perhaps even irritating, would like to awaken in the viewer an awareness of the importance of the individual, a protagonist who cannot be inscribed in general categories, and who is precious for the variegated difference of which he or she is the bearer, in an attempt to undermine an absurd, as well as unjustified prejudices.