Occhi, lingue, sangue, stelle : Carol Rama - Cecilia Granara

For the first time, the exhibition brings together ten selected works created between the mid-1950s and 2000s by the renowned artist from Turin, with a new body of paintings and site-specific interventions by Granara freely inspired by Rama’s practice.

The dialogue between Carol Rama and Cecilia Granara does not originate from a conventional curatorial research - an 'external' point of view usually aimed at identifying and juxtaposing specific aesthetic assonances or conceptual echoes between artists - but rather from its exact opposite. This is an intimate, unexpected and incidental 'encounter', which came to be after Granara’s desire to profoundly research Rama’s work and actually gives way to a parallelism of Borghesian characteristics; a literary milieu where the fates (or actions) of two or more protagonists intertwine and coexist in a perpetual state of independence and separation.

Granara and Rama, in fact - without being aware of it and spanning two distant space-time epochs - obeying an innate irrational impulse, both compelled to conceive images tapping into recurring symbolism: a smiling goddess-woman, a snake crawling up her body (or perhaps coming out!?). This is the subject of 'Naissance/Puissance' (Birth/Power), a painting that Cecilia Granara painted in 2021, but also (much to the surprise of the artist herself) of the 'Dorina' series, a group of powerful expressionist watercolours on paper by Carol Rama realised around the 1940s; 'Dorina' is confident and swaggering, she tauntingly stuck out her tongue, conjuring dark serpents from between her spread legs.

The enigmatic fusion that rattles and, in that moment, 'accompanies' the young artist in her daily painting practice, takes the form of self-analysis of convergent and divergent motivations that led her to cast the same image years later. If in first place for Carol Rama, "Dorina" represents an act of individual re-appropriation of desire and corporality - but also a self-medication that is expressed and synthesized in her famous autobiographical phrase "I paint to heal myself" – for Granara, painting has a more universal value, touching on the beneficial value of so-called art-therapy, but projecting itself outwards from the outset; an action of collective, activist ambitions, ready to explore the body invested by its emotional crises and states of transcendence.

Inevitable differences - due to logical biographical and generational gaps - that nevertheless find their strong points of intersection and vivid interchange in three fundamental attitudes: in the habitual recurrence of female iconography, in the exercise of an intrinsically 'political' painting and in the choice of pain - in its infinite declinations - as a profound primary source of knowledge.

Rather than a symbiotic figure, Carol Rama becomes for Cecilia Granara an alter-ego with whom she establishes an exchange of echoes, whose contents - in the same way as the physical phenomenon - seem apparently the same but are returned to her, and to us, with a substantial change of frequency, multiplying and enriching them with meanings; a metaphorical deforming mirror for the artist to confront herself on the complexities of the body, on the dualism of death and life instinct, while negotiating painting as a simultaneously physical and emotional space, incessantly reproducing eyes, tongues, blood and stars.