SERENA VESTRUCCI
In the work of Serena Vestrucci, daily existence often provides the raw material for her artistic experience. Raw material in the most concrete sense of the term: if, in the cycle Trucchi [Make ups], her canvases were painted with eye-shadows, robbing her technique from daily life, in these new works presented at the exhibition, it is her bed sheet that takes the place of the canvas. As she herself has explained, “every night I tie a biro to a different part of my body and let it trace freely the marks of my movements, uncontrolled and unconditioned by my active mind”. The subject of these two works, therefore, is what the artist’s body does during her sleep. The result is light traces, indecipherable in their development, which relate very delicately and chastely the substrata of her conscience. These markings are like seismographs of an involuntary artistic action. And the involuntary nature, rigorously respected by the artist during the process, becomes an aesthetic factor, due to the overall gracefulness governing the combination of the markings and the support. In a recent pamphlet, Giorgio Agamben, commenting Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegoria della pittura, recalled that sleep, for Aristoteles, was “the possession of consciousness in power”, while the state of waking coincides with “consciousness in action”. This power, Agamben explains, is not “the generalized power that can become this, that or anything in a child”, but that “proper to those who have acquired the corresponding art and knowledge”. We can therefore imagine that, with La dimensione del sonno, Serena Vestrucci left free and infinite space to her state of “power”.
