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The colour of the past.

di Gisella Borioli

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Sometimes I wonder what is in the eyes, in the hands, in the mind, in the heart of women that makes the artists, although technically and apparently similar to all artists, instead so intimately different and original. Here is the answer to this question that has guided me, over the years, to open the concept gallery MyOwnGallery, a place not of commerce but of ideas, to female art. Feminine not as discriminating but as a vast and often unexplored area where talent and sentiment meet away from artistic fashions, political metaphors, alleged avant-garde, from visual shocks, from the insolent challenges that have marked the success of the most famous contemporary artists or more media. 
"In the hands of women" is a palimpsest that for some time now has lined up artists, designers, creatives, who use their own personal language to tell the most intimate part of themselves and translate it into real works that broaden the gaze on the world. Non-trivial life stories become the often evident trace, sometimes only intuitible, of a path that leads them to Art, to the desire to dialogue with an "other" audience with which to share visions and passions. It’s at this point that, in different ways, I cross them on my way. And something snaps. That desire to say: yes, you come too, add yourself to us, to the many sisters that this gallery has welcomed for affinity and not for calculation, freely. 
At this point the artist and the person overlap and create a whole with a thousand faces with a unique heart that the works help me decipher.
Elena Chioccarelli Denis opens the pages of her memories of family, of moments of pain, of family loss but never forgotten, of true history and reconstruction, of a journey in search of self that reflects in paintings suffused melancholy and hope.
Lost and found horizons bind the past to the present, enchant when the fields of color widen liquid on the canvas.

They move when they become more minute and more precise and then they are rows of refugees, women and children, which dramatically remind us that wars in the world never end and that mothers with their children are the most innocent and unaware victims. The beautiful photos, the videos accompanying the exhibition « VITA » in MyOwnGallery remind us that the roots of Elena’s art come from the discovery of the diaries of her grandmother and her  zoologist-explorer grandfather, sent to Ethiopia in 1938, during the colonial era. With the war the head of the family remains a prisoner in Africa and his wife, with her six children, is repatriated to Italy. 

We can imagine the emotion of this discovery that invites Elena to deepen, expand, order, metabolize and rework this long story handed down for two generations and in this way not yet finished. Showing it is a bit like opening your soul, with sincerity. But women can do this very well, generous to the end.

It’s natural for viewers, to get involved in this sequence of ancient memories and modern transpositions, to grasp their sentimental aspect, the love that pervades them and the beauty that flows from them. A dramatic beauty, but calm and in a sense in peace, as if time had spread a veil over it, softening suffering.

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