Sofia Cacciapaglia (Italy)

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.

— Emma Saperstein, Chief Curator and Director of Education, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art

“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

Cacciapaglia has spent each summer of her life in her family home in Sicily. She finds inspiration in the ancient mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale near the Sicilian town of Piazza Armerina. Cacciapaglia’s figurative works suggest the villa’s renowned mosaic of female athletes. Cacciapaglia’s women inhabit a nonspecific, timeless space and the weightless gestures of their arms and hands recall the Maidens’. In both instances, the figures demonstrate an ethereal quality through a lightness achieved in tone and movement. Cacciapaglia speaks of Sicily’s “blinding and total light of midday, which moves the viewer,” and becomes strikingly present in her work.

— Lana Meador, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, San Antonio Museum of Art

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.

The women in Sofia’s practice call both to each other and to us - dancing, seducing, celebrating, resting, and perhaps, if we are lucky, enchanting us, and rebuilding their surroundings into a more hopeful future. As Jenny Hval describes in her novel Girls Against God, “We pull the structures down with us,” (Hval 2020, loc. 564). 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.

— Emma Saperstein, Chief Curator and Director of Education, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art

Sofia Cacciapaglia is a bit of an alchemist. She transforms cardboard boxes and packaging paper—inexpensive materials meant to protect precious goods during transit—into prized possessions unto themselves. Take, for instance, Affresco su Cartone series in which cardboard is repurposed into a soaring triptych. Flattened out, the boxes’ volume has been eliminated and forms elongated into three vertical supports on which Cacciapaglia has applied acrylic paint in a series of dynamic daubs and strokes. The effect is an idyllic flower garden reverberating with color and light. While her painterly approach may call to mind Monet’s impressionistic gardens, Cacciapaglia’s work is deeply rooted in her Italian heritage evoking ancient Roman wall painting as much as the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s.

— Lana Meador, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, San Antonio Museum of Art