“Like it or not, we are the cause of ourselves. Born into this world, we fall into the illusion of the senses; we believe in what appears. We ignore that we are blind and deaf. Then fear assails us, and we forget that we are divine, that we can alter the course of events, even the Zodiac.” Giordano Bruno
On the words of the philosopher, I introduce the painter Stefania Pinci and her original work “Di che segno sei?” presented during the XVII International Exhibition of Painting, Sculpture, and Photography, part of the successful project by Galleria Farini Concept Arte at Palazzo. This spring edition features the coexistence of contemporary and emerging artists alongside the great masters of 20th-century art.
Pinci is Roman, with a classical artistic and literary background under the guidance of Maurizio Calvesi. From a young age, she has been a protagonist of significant recognition for her paintings, often related to interior decoration, commissioned by prominent clients and published in internationally renowned magazines. These works highlight how her academic training provided only the “La” to embark on her own path and personal research, focused on exploring new perspectives. Her style, which naturally began from a traditional figurative base, then evolved further, experimenting with informal language. She explored the demands of a loose expressiveness, free from any superstructure, adapting intuition to the material and vice versa. Her gesture has become unmistakable, the pictorial mark she creates with the aid of the palette knife, moving through an energetic, strong, engaging, and at times synesthetic chromatic mixture, capable of evoking ancestral suggestions. This is powerfully expressed in her work “Di che segno sei?” as well. The painting, in an expressionist style, makes color and composition the two key points in the construction of the image and the narrative action. The symbolism that evokes the signs of the Zodiac is imaginative, playing with the long iconographic tradition of Astrology in what appears to be an epitome of the horoscope signs. It is a common belief and divination of astrological study that belonging to a specific zodiac sign implies a part of one’s destiny. Therefore, the question posed by Pinci’s work is one of the most common ones asked among acquaintances.
“One is always born under the wrong sign, and to live in the world with dignity means to correct one’s horoscope day by day.” Umberto Eco
And if the great Eco, always on the edge of irony, thus addressed the relationship between the zodiac and free will, Stefania Pinci, through her work, not only questions the observer but invites them to look within, deeply. To do so, she employs a syncopated pictorial rhythm, the harmony of color, the alternation of verse, and her unique graphic style, giving life to a cosmogony that resides between the celestial vault and the earthly world, a metaphor of the real and the surreal, the body and the soul, in a limbo of dreamlike suggestions.
