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Sofia Cacciapaglia’s home studio in Italy is situated in a neighborhood where there are many shops, whose owners often leave their boxes in the courtyard nearby. Cacciapaglia, who already had a vibrant painting practice on canvas, started taking these pieces of cardboard into her studio and using them as material to paint on. This new material to Cacciapaglia was much more urgent and gestural than the slower and methodological approach she has in her oil paintings on canvas. It is not the only way that this urgency appears in Cacciapaglia’s practice. The women in her paintings appear with an immediacy - belonging both to every era, and to none, like an apparition of an angel or spirit. This concept of apparition is crucial in framing Cacciapaglia’s practice at large, and the works collected for this exhibition in particular.
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Apparitions render us speechless. Those who have experienced an other-worldly presence or vision, often have trouble describing in words their experiences. Apparitions exist in the indescribable parts of our bodies and spirits, in between our blood and bones, in the nuances of our minds. Cacciapaglia herself says “Women have always fascinated me in my work because these women are symbolic — eternal, ancestral, not tied to any specific time or era, yet speaking across all times. It’s not that I don’t want to tell my own story as a woman, but my work starts from me to speak to everyone. This is also why I choose not to give titles: I believe that the language of painting is a poetic language that stands on its own and has nothing to do with words 7 .” In conversation with the sites of apparition - the fields and flowers, which Cacciapaglia also calls feminine, on both permanent and temporary material, we are invited to engage in our own apparitions, our visions, the poetic and indescribable. In this way, this exhibition Apparazione, brilliantly sets the stage and welcomes us in.
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“Women supporting one another, looking at each other, touching hands, eyes, feet, holding each other in an embrace — is fundamental. It’s the heart from which the composition begins: the contact between these women, how they support each other, is at the core of my work.” - Sofia Cacciapaglia
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Depictions of, or references to, apparitions have been present in diverse practices and genres of art history since time immemorium. One relevant example (of which there are many) is the French Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau’s 1876 watercolor Apparition depicting his version of the Biblical story of the beheading of John the Baptist utilizing the femme fatale Salome, who conjures, and casts a spell. In the Biblical narrative Moreau references, Salome performs a dance so seductive that the King grants her any wish. Her presence transforms those around her. In Cacciapaglia’s painting above and on the left, two women in red striped dresses dance a spell of their own, their expressions focused and intense. Between the two of them, there are fifteen feet, implying quick-footed movement. Unlike Moreau’s painting, which depicts the seductive dance after it has already been concluded, we encounter Cacciapaglia’s women in the middle of their dance. The apparition exists in both their very presence, and in what they may call forth.
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As Jenny Hval describes in her novel Girls Against God, “We pull the structures down with us.” Cacciapaglia’s work and her community of women so embedded in the idea of apparition, exist outside of the boundaries of the social structure, of time, and of material. They are not images we are meant to intellectually engage with. They are alive.
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Installation
