Giulia Maiorano

The title of Giulia Maiorano's work in competition, Posso quasi toccarti, triggers the narrative developed, but left open to interpretation, within the work. In the photograph presented on a screen, a girl, the artist herself, peers through an improvised telescope-it is actually a traffic signal cone, an everyday object transfigured into a paradoxical and poetic “tool,” as is customary in her photographs. The subject's gaze then points outward, as if to rest on a glazed ceramic sculpture protruding from the wall: a little girl lying dreamily on a branch. This initiates an encounter between the “virtuality” of the image and the concreteness of the sculpture, as well as between different ages of life.  “A dialogue between the present and the past, an attempt to get closer to something far away from us, almost managing to touch it.” Associating two of the usually practiced forms of expression, the work confirms the artist's poetics, a kind of “introspective conceptual” based on situations suspended between reality and imagination, between personal experience and universal symbolism. Not without a dose of melancholy, as the fairy tale side is also captured in its dark and perturbing aspects. The general atmosphere of subtle disorientation is accentuated by the fact that the image is proposed within a screen as if it were a video, creating the expectation of movement that instead does not arrive.

Stefano Castelli