Piccole Passioni, 2024 - ...
Corpus of pieces, archives, and votive objects along the Baroque route : Southern Italy, Spain, and Central Europe.
Exhibition views of 'Ce qui se loge dans les losanges', 2024, a duo exhibition with Romain Kloeckner at Le Couvent as part of PAC Off, Marseille, curated by Romain Pottier; and of 'Nos mères, nos mers', 2025, a group exhibition at L’Embarcadère, Marseille, curated by Adèle Lecrosnier Racine and Violette de Gruben.
Baroque means “irregular pearl,” from the Portuguese Barocco. If it is irregular, it embodies caprice, fantasy, and freedom of invention. In an era of doubts and fears, the convulsive and exalted art of the Baroque emerged. If it still moves us today, isn’t it because, in the face of disaster and terror, we feel far from safe? The example of Naples, a city resistant to bourgeois order, embodies the Baroque intuition. The very feeling of life, the hereditary memory of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, the fear of death, the gesticulation, the union of the funereal and the voluptuous, the theatricalization of every moment of existence… the restless, feverish, and superstitious city prefers what pleases to what is certain.
Through Piccole Passioni, the aim is to explore a contemporary relationship to belief, superstition, and collective and individual fears, but also to the performance of the self in an era marked by spectacle. This work examines the intensity of signs, the passages between visible and invisible, between sacred and profane. It is rooted in an interest in the aesthetics of the Italian Baroque and its key motifs: the mask, the veil, concealment, identity in perpetual transformation. Beneath the mask, behind the veil, a paradoxical truth emerges: we are never more ourselves than in metamorphosis.
A non-exhaustive list of Baroque motifs: stars, eggs, bulls, rural and marine landscapes, angels with butterfly wings, flies, masks, garlands, pearls, festoons, veils, clouds, capitals, rosettes, shells, she-wolves, flames, atlantes, putti, silver fish, horses, cherubs, meringues, syrups, plaster, cream. Nothing that concerns the mouth should remain foreign.
works Piccole Passioni
