Artists

Marinella Senatore, Salvatore Astore

Press release

The exhibition brings together the work of Salvatore Astore and Marinella Senatore through a reflection on human presence, explored as image, trace, and the construction of identity. Through distinct visual languages and sensibilities, the two artists investigate the body as a site where individual memory, collective experience, and the possibility of transformation intersect. In the works from Astore's Bambine series, created in the late 1990s, figures drawn from everyday experience are transformed into suspended, pared-down presences, seemingly poised between appearance and memory. Faces and silhouettes emerge from rarefied fields of colour, turning childhood into a fragile and silent state of mind. This dimension is complemented by the monumental Nudo of 1994, in which a female figure seen from behind stands isolated against an intense red ground. Space is annulled, reduced to a symbolic and timeless realm; the body's presence, enigmatic and almost archetypal, is accompanied by small natural elements that heighten the sense of suspension and mystery. As in other works from this period, Astore constructs an image that oscillates between reality and vision, between observation of the world and an inner dimension. The sculpture from the Speciazione series further introduces the theme of metamorphosis, evoking identity not as a fixed form but as an ongoing process of transformation. In Marinella Senatore's works, by contrast, the body acquires a relational and political dimension. In Un Corpo Unico, figurative fragments, gestures and layered painterly interventions give shape to a shared identity, constructed through collective experience and participation. In Autoritratto, the artist introduces a more intimate perspective: a photograph of her own hand holding a sheet of paper is traversed by painterly interventions that simultaneously conceal and reveal, transforming a simple gesture into a reflection on self-representation and the possibility of recognising oneself through the image. Between figuration and abstraction, between the individual and the collective, the works on display create a journey in which the body appears at times as a tangible presence and at others as a trace, a memory, or a site of transformation. What emerges is a meditation on the many ways of being present in the world, and on how identity takes shape through our relationship with others and with the spaces we inhabit.