Fiorenza The Headless and the others
The western open gallery, in the room that leads to Venus Fiorenza’s study, contains a wide variety of artworks, digital prints, and installations rich of inspiration and sensations which mix different techniques and genres.
Santanni reinterprets Venus Fiorenza as an extra-ordinary icon, symbol, and expression of new values, through a sort of itinerary of different stages made of digital compositions, combinations and irreverent revisited versions of the statue. Her artwork was inspired by street art, pop art, advertisement, and fashion. It uses the bronze statue of the Flemish artist Giambologna as the main character and transforms it into the muse and the aesthetic subject of the project The Headless.
For instance, Venus Vogue was created in contrast with the covers of the renowned fashion magazine in which the obsessive repetition of smiling characters transforms them into aesthetic, winking and immortal idols. In There's no rose without a thorn, Fiorenza is represented trapped in the roses which recall the rose gardens of Villa Petraia, but also depict a complex and contradictory symbol of divine perfection and earthly passion, time and eternity, life and death, fertility and virginity. A comic containing the words “God save me" expresses the intimate need of rebirth to overcome the challenges of disease (but also of life in general), becoming a real mantra of the artist who registered it as a trademark symbol. The representations of Venus with no ifs or b...reast don't recall the typical beauty elements, obsolete and outdated. They rather show the visible absence of the breast whose scar symbolizes resilience and strength from which a new form of stronger beauty, of a rediscovered and authentic femininity can rise.
Decontextualized and turned into an imaginary carnality, Blondie Fiorenza, fluctuates angelic in an Undefined Space and demonstrates, perhaps, how Giambologna saw her and Tommaso Tasso sang her. And then there is Fiorenza The Headless: immediate, communicative, deliberately sacrilegious, who becomes an irresistible female icon that dominates the Dior lipstick, also she is joyful and regenerated, with her head elsewhere.
