Verso Oriente (Turandot)

The female face is inspired by a photo of me taken in Thailand. The oriental features of the girl were congenial to me to transfigure her in the young servant Liù (Turandot by G. Puccini). Languid irony of an announced death, his own, to save an impossible love, to sanction an unlikely love ... to end a punishment: "Tu che di gel sei cinta (...) l'amerai anche tu". It was my intention to go beyond the simple realistic portrait, to try to suggest through the compositional choices and the color a spiritual and emotional content. Thus, the first floor of the girl who turns the head of three quarters towards the observer in a sudden and unexpected movement, is placed on the left side of the canvas. The rest of the surface is empty ... but it is a void that is colored by a warm bronze-gilded shade, made with a spatula and mixed with sand to obtain a rough surface, with an almost tactile material consistency. It is the color of gold itself, which by its very nature captures and refracts light, to give the perception of an illusory depth, the vague feeling of an otherwise indecipherable space but still evocative of a mysterious and exotic dimension. Two strands of ivory-white beads glued onto the girl's headdress create a pleasant ambiguity between pictorial fiction and object reality.