Relating to Evangelina Emma Alciati’s ‘Ritratto femminile (mia madre)’
 
This work is the result of relating to ‘Ritratto femminile (mia madre)’ (Turin, 1919, oil on canvas, 145 x 115 cm) by Evangelina Emma Alciati (Turin, 1883 – 1959), displayed at the Museo Boncompagni Ludovisi in Rome.
Invited by the three curators (Cecilia Canziani, Lara Conte and Paola Ugolini) of the exhibition ‘IO DICO IO’ at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome (2021) to make an audio caption for this work, I imagined talking painter to painter with Evangelina, in the form of sending her a letter. I took numerous trips to the museum to look at her painting in the flesh. After finding an untouched canvas abandoned in my studio that by strange coincidence was almost the same size as her work (unlike the dimensions I usually work with), I decided that as well as the epistolatory words I had written for her I would also create a painting. I would relate to her through my colours and by placing her mother’s hands together with my mother’s hand entwined with mine, in an interweaving of contacts between one another, and another and yet another.
 
The work consists of my painting, an audio recording and two photos (a photographic reproduction of the detail of the hands in Alciati’s painting and a photo taken in 2018 which reproduces a moment from when my mother and I were together).

AUDIO


TEXT LETTER
Venice, 14 January 2021
Dear Evangelina,
It was so wonderful to open the door to the postman today and receive the lovely surprise of this envelope containing the portrait of your mother! A lot of things have changed since I wrote to you around six months ago, so to find myself looking at your colours, but in particular that detail at the centre of the painting with your mother’s hands crossed on her lap, helped me to go back to another image of hands that would otherwise have been too painful to return to.
I never told you about this, but over the last years of my mother’s life I took a photo of my hand in hers every day for a total of 217 times. We had decided to do something that would keep us together during that strange period of her illness. My mother wanted to participate in my daily expression in some way and I wanted to involve her in it with me.
My obsessive behaviour of accumulating everything, of never letting anything that I care about go, led me to capture this gesture every time we met.
I know that you will understand what I am about to say, because I know that this is what you also repeatedly do in consistently bringing out those bold and decisive colours, in giving ample space to each single colour to let it live as if it were an independent entity and at the same time allowing it to exist alongside another colour, alongside other colours.
I could say that what we do day after day in our studios is create the conditions to allow things to happen, letting them flow in a simple, free and continuative stream. Perhaps what we are interested in is not knowing that what we produce is unique, perhaps what we are interested in is not so much feeling exclusive and original, but what makes us not feel alone is knowing that what we do has already been done by others before us, that others are doing it at the same time as us and will continue to do it continuously after us.
Now, to get back to ‘your’ hands, or rather to your mother’s hands: what they brought to mind is the act of gathering themselves, which precedes the act of them coming together, that natural and necessary act of withholding to then open up and outwards towards the other.
Thank you for that white-pink, for that black-brown, for that aquamarine and for that red, that red which frames and keeps the entire gesture together... Sending you a hug and I hope to see you soon and to resume our conversations about painting that we always had over a nice glass of wine,
Your Maria


(Written in 2021. Modified in 2021)