Breaking Point (2026) is a frontal portrait of a female figure caught on the waterline: the surface of the water cuts across her face at the level of the mouth. Above the line the flesh is warm — orange, ochre, yellow; below it, the same skin cools into green and blue. A single face lives in two mediums at once. It is the image of an identity in transit — not the story of a journey, but the moment when the one who crosses discovers she belongs to both shores and to neither.
The work is built on two membranes that fail to hold.
The first is the helmet — a bell of air around the head, meant to isolate and protect the diver. But the membrane is permeable: the water has already entered, the waterline runs inside the helmet, across the face itself. The protection leaks. This is the condition of the one who migrates carrying a shell of her origin, only to find it porous, unable to keep the new world out.
The second membrane is physical and sits in front of the painting: a sheet of plexiglass, the very border between the work and the viewer. This sheet is fractured. From the crack, painted bubbles rise and pass beyond the edge of the image, escaping the frame. What was meant to stay contained — identity, breath, history — leaks out. The rupture is not depicted: it has happened, in the material itself.
The two membranes tell one thing: in the process of transformation, something broke. Not a metaphor for successful change, but the more uncomfortable truth of migration — the point of failure, where the borders between a person's inner worlds stop holding.
For the Galata — a museum that holds stories of departures, returns and routes of no return — this figure is an inner route. The sea is not a backdrop but a threshold: a line that separates and connects at once, exactly like skin and glass. The breach in the sheet is also, in maritime language, the breach in a hull: the point where water enters and the crossing changes its nature.
The work engages the exhibition space through its physical depth: the fractured sheet stands off from the painted surface, casts shadows onto it, shifts with the light and with the movement of the viewer's gaze. It is not a flat image on a wall but an object asking to be crossed — like a threshold.
Breaking Point belongs to my ongoing research Permeabilità: the female body as a membrane between states, between lands, between belongings. Here that research reaches its most exposed point: the membrane gives way, and lets through.
Technical note: the fracture in the plexiglass and the bubbles painted on the sheet are intentional conceptual elements chosen by the artist — not damage, not transit deformation. The work is a multi-layered object: the painted surface and the fractured sheet are to be kept together.
