Upon Time, Secci Gallery 

Bea Bonafini,

Daria Dmytrenko,

Carla Giaccio Darias,

Sahara Longe,

Sophie Spedding

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January 29 - March 12 2022

​​​“Upon a time tells one and a thousand stories, populated by characters who leap from one painting to another, from a tapestry to a sculpture. Heroines, monsters and mythical animals, magical figures protagonist of a story that never happened "

writes Edoardo Monti in his introductory text.

 

The five artists not only share the common experience of the artistic residency in Palazzo Monti but also a vast imaginary capable of giving life to dreamlike atmospheres, almost fairy at times. Yet, are not all fables those told within "Upon a Time", like the portraits of Sahara Longe (1994), where settings and subjects – familiar at first glance - correspond to a dry composition in which the silhouettes of new protagonists capable of overturning a entirely Western history of art. Thus the works of Sophie Spedding (1995), giving space to corporeality and its manifestations in a intrusively sincere way, seem to use another reality to explore the persistence of mental representations. Through a painting with intense tones, Daria Dmytrenko (1993) explores the psychological dimension of the individual pausing in the limbo between dream and reality; a field of research similar to that of Carla Giaccio Darias (1998), whose works investigate the processes of memory activation through the recollection of images. The practice of Bea Bonafini (1990), on the other hand, recalls mythology and popular history in an intertwining of hybrid figures that blend with each other, creating collages of shapes with delicate colors, nevertheless capable of effectively transmitting the tenor of the representation.

 

In this way, "Upon Time" is presented as an overturned world, a delicate irony aimed at gently bringing the visitor closer to an apparently enchanted world capable of revealing intimate narratives, collective reflections and spaces for psychological investigation.