Artist: Cecilia Granara
Exhibition title: Lasciare entrare, Lasciare andare
Curated by: Maria Chiara Valacchi
Venue: Studiolo, Milan, Italy
Date: February 26 – September 7, 2020
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Studiolo, Milan
Studiolo is pleased to present the first Italian solo show by Cecilia Granara (Jeddah, 1991) entitled “Let it enter then let it go, curated by Maria Chiara Valacchi. The installation consists of a selection of eight paintings and a site-specific wall installation.
Using painting as metalanguage, Cecilia Granara often celebrates the female body and its state of inner consciousness – mental and emotional – which is in constant flux. This becomes a dynamism that she projects into her large canvasses through an informal handling of outlines, taking possession of the highest and most ecstatic sense of figuration. She splits, multiplies, intertwines, until she embraces flames, animals and nature.
Like humoral liquids, tears, or different types of human secretions, the brush strokes fade the acid tones of forms which, standing out vividly against neutral and vibrant backgrounds, create scenes that bring out atavistic tales, anthropomorphic mutations and bodies that expel or inter-weave with each other, until they assume oriental flavoured positions that reminds us of Yoga or Savasana.
Granara carries out a peaceful re-affirmation of woman’s universal role through free, joyful and grotesque sexual representations which, at the same time, describe different states of emancipation, neglect or pain, without any gender limit. This is a love declaration that in the exhibition is embodied in the figure of Sheela-Na-Gig, a medieval sculptural iconography representing a woman with big eyes and a freely open vulva, without shame; it’s a metaphor of being intellectually open to the world, forgetting prejudices and fears.
The artist composes an exhibition woven of several aesthetic and etymological contaminations, far from any morality or tag, joyfully promoting the pursuit of an authentic personal model. This is the embrace of what she calls a “Body Confusion”.
