My work as a figurative artist is often constructed in dialogue with
pictorial tradition, frequently with images that have been enshrined as part of the
imaginary of art history. But my intention is not to return to them to
reiterate them, but to open them up. To enable these forms, emblems of beauty,
purity, or the ideal, to also speak to other realities.
In Lady with a Foo Lion, I revisit Cecilia Gallerani's image and sprinkle it
with elements from non-Western traditions: the lady sports a mehndi tattoo on
her hand, like those worn by women in India, and facial paint characteristic of
certain Amazonian peoples decorates her face, while a Foo lion, or Buddha's
lion, a protective creature in Chinese culture, replaces the ermine.
I think this reconfiguration can be read in more than one direction. On the
one hand, as a gesture that questions the traditional centrality of the West,
making visible that which has historically been marginalized and overlooked. In
this sense, the work strains against cultural hierarchies and proposes a visual
fusion that destabilizes the notion of aesthetic purity.
But at the same time, I sense a spirit of encounter in this painting. The
lady doesn't renounce her symbolic lineage: she places it at the service of a
broader, almost hospitable perspective. She thus becomes a sort of multicultural
ambassador, who, from her iconic position, offers her image to give visibility
to other worlds, other memories, other forms of beauty.
I'm interested in leaving this ambivalence open. I want the viewer to
oscillate between a critical and a more poetic reading, between the
destabilization of the canon and the possibility of imagining a universal
image, where the central and the peripheral are not mutually exclusive, but
instead dialogue through difference.
