The fairy-tale and mystical imagery of artist Rachele Frison (1995) arrives at Rea! Art Fair, along with the other ninety-nine selected artists, beginning Thursday, Oct. 12, the opening date of the exhibition at Milan’s Fabbrica del Vapore. Frison will present the canvases Lost in the Garden and Simple Punitive Action, emblematic of his research that “rests its roots on an elegant and mythical literary and cultural past, steeped in fairy tales, myths, legends.” – as stated in an excerpt from Erica Massaccesi‘s critical text. Her works are dreamlike narratives that draw from classical iconography, evoking water lilies and satyrs, bacchanals and gods.

The subjects, sometimes alone other times in a collective context, perform actions and interact with external elements as if guided by a high and superior entity not made explicit by the artist. The androgynous and asexual bodies, combined with often absent gazes, insert the characters into a kind of subjugating dimension. The bluish, livid and cold colors reinforce the epic, dreamlike and fairy-tale component found in the symbolism of the representations such as the moon and the snake, but also in the expressiveness of the subjects, sometimes drowsy, sometimes sorrowful, sometimes enigmatic.

Rachele Frison’s canvases “crystallize time and space.” They lead the viewer into a space-time cutout that, however surreal, does not appear so distant from our collective imagination, a veteran of mythologies and fairy tales absorbed into our cultural baggage. Frison, making use of this familiarity, creates a narrative that places an ancestral language in dialogue with a more contemporary one, resulting in an incredibly current one.

Courtesy Rachele Frison