madreuniverso

Like modern Byzantine icons, the female figures of Genesio Pistidda occupy the space of the composition saturating the dark background with the precious embroidery of the intensely decorative veil. The foreshortened structure and the zeroing of the face load the image with evocative force and, at the same time, implement a series of visual suggestions that the chromatic and luminous variants accentuate and enhance. In reality, the layout, as simple as it is effective, takes up the classical portraiture system remodeled in the serial sequence of pop derivation. So a lace headdress that frames an absent face lends itself, in the shape and lighting of the colors, to solicit multiple references, from the traditional Sardinian costume to the Muslim veil. In any case, the underlying poetics that pay homage to women, to all women and to all mothers, in the infinite inventive richness of graphic solutions is clear. The veil thus acquires a vast symbolic meaning: a sign of connection between distant and apparently opposite cultures, reveals its universal figure in the continuity and conflict between tradition and modernity. As in the work of Shrin Neschat, to whom these compositions want to make a small tribute in the game of the emotions and overlaps they create, but also in the desire for reconciliation between East and West. Mariolina Cosseddu