The work originates from an intimate and everyday image: a family scene during a rainy day in the woods, in the mountains. A blanket opened to shelter the children unexpectedly recalls an ancient iconographic memory — that of the Madonna della Misericordia (Madonna of Mercy), traditionally depicted protecting and gathering people beneath her mantle. The presence of the children is not only visible in the two bodies gathered under the blanket, but also in the unborn child carried in the woman’s womb. The image therefore becomes an expanded representation of protection, where the maternal gesture simultaneously contains presence, expectation, and possibility. From this spontaneous association, the work takes shape as a contemporary reinterpretation of a sacred image, stripped of religious rhetoric and brought back into a domestic, emotional, and vulnerable dimension.
The piece is created with pastel on a copper surface obtained by recovering and flattening old gutter elements. The support retains the material memory of time and use, transforming an architectural fragment into a pictorial surface. This choice also reinforces the ideas of shelter, protection, and transformation that run throughout the work. The use of pastel emerged almost instinctively: the discovery of a box of old colors immediately directed the process toward a fragile, powdery, tactile technique. The white lines traced across the copper surface — a central element of the composition — preserve the quality of a preparatory drawing and make visible the original gesture of the image, like luminous traces emerging from the material itself.
The golden background explicitly recalls the gold grounds of medieval and proto-Renaissance painting, yet it is reinterpreted through an essential, almost abstract vegetation that evokes the forest without depicting it realistically. The red ground introduces a more emotional and symbolic dimension rather than a naturalistic one.
The work moves between family memory and sacred iconography, between material recovery and archetypal imagery, seeking a balance between everyday fragility and a universal sense of protection.
