Vincenza Luppino, visual artist

An intense, almost visceral red: the colour of blood, of life, but equally of acute pain and suffering. It stands for the vulnerability of a soul laid bare — not a concealed pain but a living one, pulsing and aflame. The material texture and the dense vertical folds generate a powerful sense of laceration and depth, legible as scars and rents: the vertical lines evoke deep incisions, open wounds, or flaps of skin and of soul that overlap in the attempt to close. The thick, geometric black frame performs an essential function — it signifies darkness, void, or rationality, rendering the solitude of suffering all the more conspicuous. The work confers form upon the complexity of inner pain. It describes not a superficial suffering but a structural wound, profound and intimate, wherein the beauty of art becomes the means to grant visible, tangible form to that which ordinarily cannot be seen: the pain of the soul.

A sheet of red industrial felt folds against the wall like a single blanket drawn over bodies sleeping pressed together — interlocked not for want of space, but in search of warmth. Its cut upper edge forms an uneven line of heads; each fold is a body conforming to the contour of the next in symbiosis, finding its place solely through contact. The last and deepest fold closes about the others, gathering the whole to itself in a single embrace. Dormire accozzati — sleeping cuddling, pressed together. Soft where sculpture is customarily hard, the work compresses an entire crowded sleep into a single red mass: no figures are shown, only their pressure.

A scorched epidermis of saturated, flaming orange constitutes the uppermost register: the stratum of fire, the most exposed layer, riven by heat and fractured over time into a dense lattice of fissures — at once arid earth and cooled lava, a crust that bears downward with an almost corporeal gravity. At the precise centre of this tension emerges the stratum of fibre: the raw jute is no discrete element but a fold of the terrain itself, a flap of crust — or of skin — that rises and unravels beneath the tectonic pressure between the two zones, casting literal shadow. Below, the stratum of silence responds: a chalky white, static and composed, its surface coarse yet ordered, where the absence of colour opens an absolute void. The work resides precisely at this line of rupture, as the jute appears to subside, descending from the turbulent, incandescent zone above into the silent purity of the one below. Viewed in profile, the painting discloses its depth: the fissures in the orange become apertures onto the strata beneath, while the jute serves as a three-dimensional bridge between turbulence and repose. It does not merely solicit the gaze — it asserts its physical presence through relief, fracture, and the weight of its own skin.

A field of unbroken red, interrupted by two raised lines that never meet and closed at its base by a stratification of matter. As in Intervallo, the only events within the field are its caesurae.

Above, a white field traversed by a single gesture in relief, as light as a breath. Below, a lacquered red mass gathers into folds like living flesh. At the centre, the red netting lifts to form a nest: a woven womb of vessels that receives and nourishes two fuchsia forms. The title names the vital sap that passes from the maternal body to that which is yet to grow — warmth and substance at once. Here red does not wound; it protects and sustains.

Two red masses, lacquered and fissured, occupy opposite corners of a white field. Between them runs a glossy red ribbon that coils upon itself, drawing a fine netting like a tissue of veins stretched between two bodies. It is the thread that binds distant destinies: it holds, even though on the left the colour spatters across the white and leaves the trace of a rupture.

The work presents itself as a dense, vertical drapery in a deep burgundy hue tormented and scarlet. Its glossy finish heightens the stark chiaroscuro contrast between the illuminated reliefs and the geometric shadows cast within the recesses. The movement of the drapery — chaotic at the centre and unfurling toward the edges — generates a dynamic energy reminiscent of the Baroque. The folds appear to be pushed from within, suggesting the presence of an invisible force or a concealed body; yet, it is the title itself that provides the conceptual key to unveiling its illusory nature. The artist manipulates the medium to replicate the transient suppleness of fabric or leather, freezing this inherent fluidity into a solid, inert, and timeless structure. The artwork thus becomes a meditation on the deception of perception: while the eye registers movement and pliancy, the mind recognises the rigidity of the sculpture, thereby celebrating the age-old power of art to falsify reality in order to reveal a new aesthetic truth: Material Illusion.