Silent Gestures

"We are so accustomed to sound, to noise, that when we find ourselves in absolute silence, the first thing we notice is a sense of strangeness. Yet, even in total silence, in the complete absence of noise, it is possible to hear a song. It makes its way inside us the moment we are ready to receive it, a sound that touches the notes of the soul, passing not through the ears, but through the eyes: it is the song of gesture. Through painting, photography, cyanotype, and drawing, the works in this exhibition break the limit of two dimensions, telling us about the silence of gestures, or rather, what certain silent gestures have to say. And the message arrives, precisely through the representation of hands, in their most common yet now so rare gestures. These are hands that offer, that seek us, like the gesture of the girl painted by Elena Baboni, a pose fixed in time, the gift of a flower, a gaze that seems to follow an intuition. That gesture is found in Shanti Ranchetti, hands/icon, hands/symbol, almost a flight of shadow puppets, from which the impossible blooms, enchantment. Another flower speaks to us through signs and tells us of a gift using the language of signs: 'seeds,' the hands say. And it is the flower of Rebecca J that offers them to us, whose gaze seems to question our ability to take care of them. The delicate relationship between parents and children is narrated by the gestures in the works of Antonio Delluzio and Elisabetta Reicher, the first a photographer, the second a visual artist, whose works, though profoundly different, speak of the delicacy of supporting and letting go. Elena C. Doria also somehow speaks of a gift received and of her being a daughter, and in her drawings, we find, intensely, the relationship between hands/gesture/nature, the same kind of relationship found in Gaia Cairo, again hands, this time embraced, tattooed, accompanied, protected by marine animals in the silent, deep blue of her watercoloured cyanotypes, reminding us of her deep love for the underwater world. In Paola Casulli, we see the emergence of the sacredness of gestures, prayers, false myths, expectations that are reconciliations, in an interesting black-and-white photographic triptych, a chromatic choice that also accompanies the surreal grotesque march of hands skilfully drawn in pencil by Nic Alessandrini. Non-verbal language reveals much about us, so it seems we can intuit the personal neuroses of each individual illustrated by Giulia Savino, characters that everyone can say they have encountered at least once in their lives, because gestures, like clothes, become our personal captions and classify us. Finally, there is the importance of a gesture that becomes apparent in the very silent surreal landscape of Angelo Barile, where everything is suspended, and the rules of physics are overturned; after all, we are in the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve and what is considered the progenitor of all gestures. Everything that will happen after starts here."