Rome, October 2018. After the project “Eleven Lives”, in which he represented the biographies of eleven great women, the artist Micaela Legnaioli continues her research with “Parallel Lives” at Open ART-Sala da Feltre in Rome. The ten works on metal, on display from October 11 to December 31, take up the idea of excellent lives, and represent five female characters along with their companions: Messalina and Claudio, Matilde and Goffredo il Bello, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, Marie and Pierre Curie, Mary and Percy Shelley.
The protagonists chosen by the artist are united by the same initial of the first name, the “M”. The idea was born with “Eleven Lives”, an exhibition curated by Prof. Claudio Strinati, who identified the inspiration for the project as follows: “despite this somewhat Dadaist idea of laying the foundations of an artistic work like this, the assumption of the exhibition is very serious and thoughtful … the slabs carved and oxidized with acids that make up the whole of the works of the exhibition, want to give the idea of the spiritual, cultural and moral stratification deposited in each of us because of the events of life and experience. So a kind of DNA on the contrary, which is not born with us but is a synthesis of what happens to the individual and that determines his fate. The works, almost two-dimensional, seem to want to reconnect, in those irregular drawings and in their different layers a bit ‘typical of the rocks, the meaning of the overlap of experiences and the unmistakable signs that, in the life of each, in the grooves and tones, forever mark us making us unique. “My work on the individual and on what makes him unique, with the emotional and experiential load, here continues as a true story of past lives” – said Legnaioli. The research goes beyond the portrait already experimented in the series “impronte” and applies to intimate and more in-depth investigations of the human being. It is a seduction of the soul, its own, that goes beyond the first glance.
Compared to the moment of realization, the novelty with respect to “Eleven Screws” is the experimentation of acid on copper: women are made on sheets of zinc but men, and it is the first time for Micaela Legnaioli, on copper carved and oxidized. These are material works that, in the concretions and in the different colors, want to represent the character and life experiences of the characters represented. The size of the works seems to correspond to the years of life of these women of the past, the men instead are on slabs of the same size, the thickness of the traces, real furrows colored by the oxidative reaction, follows the impact of various experiences in their lives. The result leads to maps of the individual characters always different from each other. The meaning of each work can be deciphered, but it is revealed only after a more careful and patient observation.
