Chiara Calore

The competing painting titled Bardo - imprinted on the canvas and visible at particular temperatures thanks to the use of thermal colors - depicts a lush agglomeration of shells, animal and plant beings, rising in a seascape. The subject draws inspiration from the painting Seashells and Seagrasses (1809) by Dutchman Henricus Franciscus Wiertz, to which are added references to seventeenth-century fish still lifes by Giuseppe Recco, while the monstrous creature holding up the composition is a reinterpretation of Zeus turned into a bull in the waters, depicted by Jean Cousin the Elder in The Rape of Europa (c. 1550). Other details hark back to Perseus frees Andromeda by Piero di Cosimo and the Torment of St. Anthony, attributed to a young Michelangelo Buonarroti. This is how Calore draws on tradition to elaborate fantastic visions with allusions to the erotic sphere.

Arianna Baldoni