On Saturday 4 May at 6.00 pm, the painting exhibition “I Volti dell’Anima”, by the artist Maria Luisa Barbuti, will be inaugurated at the Municipal Gallery – Castello Aragosese, during which the Cav. Prof. Carmen Galluzzo Motolese, President of the UNESCO Club of Taranto and Ass. Marco Motolese.
The exhibition has the portrait as its common theme and focuses on the pathos of the soul which is revealed through the expression of faces between physicality and immateriality – since man contains within himself the components of body and soul, of concrete and abstract. In this sense Mary, Mother of Jesus, becomes its central theme and emblem.
The genre is figurative and draws inspiration from the works of the Sacred tradition, combined with the sensitivity and creativity of the artist who renews and passes on its content. This is how on Mary’s face we read feelings of love and tenderness, of suffering and sweetness, of firmness and justice, of consolation and triumph, of the immanent and the transcendent.
In imagining the exhibition, the painter thought, first of all, of the feminine, of the woman and in the feminine the gaze of Mary, the Mother of Jesus and of all men, shone. The sacred theme of the Madonna becomes universal, ancient and modern. Drawing Madonnas and re-proposing the expressions of their changing faces and their changing poses means seeking and offering the capacity for contemplation that transcends everyday life; it means seeking and transmitting spirituality, against the usual desires of simple materialism.
The iconographic path of the exhibition captures emotional fragments of Mary’s time with: “Virgo Lactans”, “Mater cum puer”, “Mater in gaudio”, “Mater Dolorosa”, up to the Immaculate Conception who descends to earth to defeat evil, to then rise again and be crowned Regina Coeli. The Madonna becomes the emblem of a human and divine Creature. She is human like the Mother of Jesus, she is sweet and loving, painful and dramatic. She divines as Queen of the world, when she ascends into the Kingdom of Heaven in the presence of the Most High.
The artist, with painstaking work, rich in details and nuances, recovers slowness. And it is precisely the slowness that leads her to careful observation and identification with the model that inspires him. By intentionally distancing herself from the astonishing power of the digital, she recovers that movement of the soul that is transferred into the gesture and from the gesture onto paper or canvas.
The works are created freehand, according to traditional drawing and painting techniques and the exhibition also includes a series of graphite and sanguine drawings. The pastel and mixed technique with gold and stones makes use of the traditional use of drawing and painting tools, seeking the preciousness and refinement of lines and colours, while in the graphite and sanguine drawings, which enrich the exhibition, the line, delicate and supple typical of the instrument.
