(NO)
PORTRAIT
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THE ANTI PORTRAIT
A couple of centuries of emancipation of women are not enough to erase
The traces of a power imbalance between male and female individuals which is still present in today's society. For centuries it has been a well known phenomenon in less developed Countries due to rooted socio-cultural and religious foundations, but still present and never fully eradicated even in the richest Countries of the planet. This is the reason why we are still dealing with this social dilemma, a proper cultural conflict, not just the deviance of a group of male individuals.
Donatella Izzo's women are victims of violence of our time, but their eyes are able to surpass the thin borders of memories to to collect in the personal e collettive memory, a woman of the past, a mother, a grandmother or a random woman just met. Yesterday as today, as if time stopped unable to delete episodes of physical and psychological violence toward the female gender.
Izzo's woman is a woman who has been through a lot: the faces are defaced, erased with notable cuts, scratches and skin abrasion. Often their faces are stained, often of red color.
The physical mistreatment mixes with the psychological one when the photography captures the light in their wide open, but still, eyes perhaps scared, certainly tired.
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The violence experienced but these women is translated in the artworks starting from the technique used by the artist: the photograph is only one of the many steps of a bigger sequence which includes paint, collage, abrasion e erasure. The photographic technique is inspired by a personal path or restoration and rebuilt of what was broken and damaged, sectioned to be explored rebuilding and reassembling the portrait with an unusual method, rich of formal composure, with the goal to create a dialectic tension between the broken, incomplete and almost absent subject and the viewer, who enters a in a state of reflection on what it was lost.
Even if defaced, violated and erased the Izzo's woman looks at us proudly, in the latest act of forgiveness, or resignation, in a desperate but silent scream for help.
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