seeking for temptation Drawing

The starting point of Flaminia Lizzani’s lengthy and intense research finds its point of departure in the need to investigate a common intimacy, a universal physicality of the feminine, not the body of a single woman. But this exploration is a direct line between the gaze upon the model and the graphic gesture, in a concentration of energies that pass through meditative practice, brush-stroking a ritualism that leads to absence. The artist leaves it up to the sign to act, moved by the desire to show female nudity in silent meditation, in the shamelessness of thighs thrown wide open, or even in bizarre and precarious balance. The spread of slender carnal shapes and their movements, caught with the immediacy of a photographic lens, suggest the unwinding of a film. It would be all too easy to make reference here to the lengthy association – first at family level, then through work – with the world of cinema. But the work of Flaminia Lizzani goes further. Her drawings measure a boundless love for the female being, and with a rapid stroke she appears to want to dissect its countless facets. Each pose may conceal a fragility, a dark side, a carefree lack of inhibition, or expressions of vitality, that belong to each woman, of which the artist becomes a docile medium. The Italian title of the exhibition ‘Nidi di Donna’, casually and curiously suggested by Franco Losvizzero on seeing the works for the first time, plays on a vowel change. ‘Nudi’ or ‘nudes’ is transformed into ‘Nidi’ or ‘nests’, revealing the beginning of a very long story which began more than thirty years ago, through dialogues with the drawings and Chinese ink designs of the artist’s mother: a timeless tale that only superficially, and with some approximation, can be reduced and evaluated as a single-themed exercise. The charcoal, the model, thousands of sheets with rapid and continuous strokes, shots that are never predictable, for an infinite series of frames: the artist is not concerned with faithfully or academically reproducing the female anatomical geography. Her approach is loving, a profound surge that issues from the vibrant, stubborn impulse of some works, and veers towards a very personal vision touching on spirituality. In fact, the very young Flaminia who, without wanting to emulate them, chose Piero della Francesca, Giorgio Morandi, and Egon Schiele as travelling companions, may now find herself akin to practices that take on an almost sacred mission of inner research, like the Shodo, the calligraphic art of the Far East. But with her works, Flaminia Lizzani seems to want to remind us, above all, of the beauty of the female body, whose poetry she skillfully translates, thus transforming it into a symbol of infinite variations. In this way, even the daily urgency of defending it against stereotypes and violence is renewed through a restitution of looks: ours, admiring and complicit, and the artist’s, innocent and passionate. Text by Maria Arcidiacono

Drawing:Charcoal on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:19.7 W x 13.8 H x 0 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.