Ssssss (Il cuore non ha rughe \ The heart has no wrinkles) Painting

This artwork belongs to a series called Il cuore non ha rughe (The heart has no wrinkles), a series about love and eroticism. The series Il cuore non ha rughe, like Carte Libertine (Libertine Papers), is inspired by the figure of Madame Sévigné and her intimate epistolary correspondence with the daughter. Within this correspondence Madame Sévigné describes the life of the Parisian aristocracy at Sun King's court which for Masone is very similar to the Venetian one, both made of intrigue, betrayals, passions and love. In this series, images of seductive women are alternated with quotes about love taken from poems by various authors. The shapes of the female figures are made with many layers of handmade cotton paper that gives different thicknesses to the image and creates beautiful light and shadow effects. Masone creates his support, the thick cotton paper, that is not just a simple support – like plaster, canvas or stone – but it is an artistic and artisanal creation itself for its workmanship and the beauty of the material. Four white cotton ribbons are incorporated into the sheet of paper that serve to hang the artwork, without the use of frames, or to tie together several paintings to form a more complex installation, for example combining an image with a poetry. The sensuality that transpires from these works is the same of Madame de Sévigné and of the seventeenth century French nobility, where eroticism was considered a mental freedom that made people 'libertines', a word that has nothing in common with libertinism as we interpret it today. The vast epistolary does not depict morbid personal experiences but, on the contrary, Madame de Sévigné describes the more abstract libertinage made of whispers, looks and smiles rather than sexual experiences. It is a description that recalls the perfumes and the aura of the eroticism of the Paris court, which was celebrated with sublime gossip and became uninteresting when it was downgraded to banal and obscene sex that transform the erotic beauty of a hidden gaze into flesh, sweat and pants. The series The heart has no wrinkles and Libertine Papers reflect the erotic contents of the letters as Masone feels them.