The MAN Museum of Nuoro presents the first institutional exhibition dedicated to the deep intellectual and emotional dialogue that linked Maria Lai (1919-2013) to the Peruvian artist Jorge Eielson (1924-2006). Against the backdrop of a rural Sardinia, immersed in the remote places of 'Ogliastra, two extraordinary authors of the twentieth century intertwine their private history with the expressive one; they share reflections on the world and on aesthetics, sign works together, dedicate words and images to each other. Jorge's poems suggest to Maria new fairy tales for her threads. Maria's Sardinia, its archaic past, its fairies, the Mediterranean, nourish Jorge's verses and those knots of cloth, heritage of a South American culture that he brings with him to the island and sews to the primitive iconography of his homeland. adoption.

Eielson had left Peru in 1948 and had lived in Paris and Switzerland before settling in Italy in 1951. In Bari Sardo, his life marries that of another local author, Michele Mulas, himself an artist and witness of a creative friendship that unfolds between the eighties and nineties, tracing a path of shared thoughts on lyrical and recurring themes, such as nature and the cosmos, words and love.

The exhibition project, signed by Elisabetta Masala, curator of the MAN, contemplates about sixty works by Maria Lai and Jorge Eielson, some of which are unpublished and presented to the public for the first time, found in private collections that have not yet been valued, as well as from the historical archives of both authors. The itinerary winds through a narration in two voices that sees paintings, canvases, sculptures and technical experiments by Lai and Eielson unravel by sections, the landscape, poetry, stars, geographies, in the idea of restoring the harmony of a common feeling and small "knots" that link the anthropological reasons for the work of both, between the island's past and that of the native Peruvians.