An all-female exhibition at Mimmo Scognamiglio in Milan, which opened last May 22 and is open until July 26. Three young women artists, Anna Bochkova (1995), Evgeniya Pankratova (1997) and Chiara Ressetta (1996), are here placed in dialogue by curator Milena Zanetti who, under the pretext of the mirror understood as a tool for looking beyond, reflects on the relationship between personal experience and collective symbols. Beginning with the title – Punteggiato di luce, giaceva lì, scintillante – the exhibition evokes a magical, poetic, fairy-tale dimension. The paintings and sculptures, arranged in an orderly white cube-like setting, open a window to another world, decidedly dreamlike and at times mysterious. Emblematic in this sense is Butterfly, the work by Evgeniya Pankratova, which – as Zanetti explains – «opens the scene onto different worlds to let us enter florid, floating gardens that symbolize the ideal world and cosmic order».
While Pankratova reveals to us the world hidden behind the cloth – which many might associate with that of Maya-, in Ressetta’s paintings different realities mingle with each other by welcoming shy figures that like spectres blend in among the marked decorativism adopted by the artist. The third level of interpretation, again with a view to the subject-symbol relationship, is given by Bochkova with her sculptural elements. Ceramic humanoids that look to a crude and primitive language, decidedly deliberate so as to eliminate any sign of gender or character, place the emphasis on the emotional sphere, particularly accentuating the delicacy brought here by the floral element, which for the artist is a symbol of «the ephemeral nature of feelings such as love and purity.»
«Within the works of the three young artists, it is therefore always the object that holds the substantial knowledge of what is hidden and the otherwise unseen effects. Affective mirrors that communicate our states of mind in such a way that the image leads one towards the other.»
Milena Zanetti
Courtesy Mimmo Scognamiglio, the artists
