The triptych belongs to the most recent series The Dragon and I and pauses to reflect precisely on the concepts of threshold and passage. Sheets of polyester are drawn by the artist in graphite, inlaying the curvilinear, enigmatic and dreamlike figures of dragons on transparent paper. If in Western culture the dragon takes on a purely negative value (just think of the Christian 'legends' of St. George and the dragon, or the figure of the dragon told in the Apocalypse myth), in Eastern culture the dragon instead takes on an opposite value, definitely positive. The dragon represents good luck, wellness, to the point of becoming the animal figure of the emperor himself or the ward of the entrance of the Shinto Shrines or Buddhist Temples. These reflections are the result of a recent trip by the artist to China and Japan, where these representations to which our Western eyes are used to associate negative values, carpeted the ceilings and entrances of temples, schools and imperial palaces.
The work has been realized for a site specific installation in the “Hall of the Squires” in the amazing Palazzina di Caccia in Stupinigi (Turin, Italy). The room presents amazing decorations of hunt scenes and on the ceilings a huge fresco representing Jason and the winged dragon. For this reason the artist chose to represent three dragon-drawings exhibited unframed but standing on steel-pedestal, exploiting the amazing light from the three massive windows that come into the room trespassing the transparent polyester sheets and making the drawing more vivid and evocative.
The reference to Chinese philosophy, to a conception of circular time, to a non-perspective but symbolic vision of the subjects and the landscape is reflected in the circular composition of the animal forms of dragons, represented overlapped on a background of light. Like looming shadows, hidden but present, dragons obsessively move in a circle, alluding to the coexistence of good and evil, of positive and negative. The concept of threshold therefore progressively migrates towards an increasingly mystical and inner conception: in The Dragon and I the conflict between positive and negative is reflected within the artist herself, quoted through the personal pronoun in the title, but visually absent.
