“In a reality forcefully based on appearance and on the concept of collective perfection, Donatella Izzo’s artworks escape the linguistic conventions and interpretative traditional mechanisms which revolve around the idea of portrait and the perception of identity. The artist makes us participant of a personal perception of identity - both individual and collective - now fragmented and stripped of its sense of belonging on the transcendental end.

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The focus of the project is moved to the the new codes of reading that chip away at the classic concept of portrait intended as “copy”, in favor of an “anti- portrait”: an introspective analysis of the pictured subject, almost always feminine, a universe on which Izzo focuses particularly. Women suspended in a sacred instant, almost impossible to be interpreted, but alive since aesthetically remodeled. 

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Izzo’s portraits do not represent a true copy, they search for what lies beyond the subject’s appearance, expressing universal feelings almost always connected to the never ending conflict between being and appearing, soul and body, surface and the essence of being itself. 

These photographs are an exemplary transposition of the torment and conflict which characterize the human condition.” F. Mutti