Inauguration: Saturday 10 December, 5.00 pm

The Galleria Parmeggiani in Reggio Emilia hosts, from 10 December 2022 to 12 January 2023, the solo exhibition of Antonella De Sarno, actress-performer and visual artist, born in the province of Modena but living in France for years.
Created in collaboration with the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia, the exhibition will be inaugurated on Saturday 10 December at 17.00 with a critical presentation by the curators Francesca Baboni and Stefano Taddei and two performative narrations led by the artist at 17.00 and 18.00.

The exhibition, entitled "Alfabeti", is part of the official program of "Identità Inquieta", the program that brings together the cultural institutions of the area to explore the theme of identity from different points of view.
Antonella De Sarno's project, unpublished and specially designed for the spaces of the Museum, is based on the combination, at first sight impossible, of two female figures: the famous Dame à la Licorne of the Musée de Cluny in Paris, with her aura of medieval mystery, and Kathrine, the imaginary name of an autistic woman, with whom the artist has been working for many years in his dance workshops.

«Weaving semantic threads in the space that divides them – explains Antonella De Sarno – could help make the different sense of the word less disturbing. The purpose is to construct a work in the absence of discourse, rather following the thread of poetic intuition, capable of dragging words out of themselves, to make them objects, visions, images. Wrapped in a drapery of silence, Kathrine and the Dame are two mute figures, inaccessible in different ways, who like Sibyls send ambivalent and opaque messages. They exist in a world 'invented' by narration: one because she is a figure whose existence has built up a depth through the dense narrative of which she has been the subject, the other because she lives immersed in the world that she continuously invents herself».
The exhibition itinerary, which winds along the first floor of the Galleria Parmeggiani, is made up of over forty works, including drawings, videos and installations, all pieces of another lexicon, in which the universes and alphabets of the two women can finally coexist, leading the visitor to the burning root of things, when they are not yet tamed and made tame by the conventional discourse of the 'socially acceptable'.

«The poetics of Antonella De Sarno - explain the curators Francesca Baboni and Stefano Taddei - plays on philosophical and psychological references, which combine together in a sort of refined mirror game. With the use of drawing, installation, video and objects, the artist builds a fantastic world, a wunderkammern within which correspondences move between the chosen subjects. The interpretation therefore becomes a series of alphabets, a codified language that leads to interaction and presents monstrous figures, indecipherable morphemes and bodies linked to a representation close to art brut».
The "Alfabeti" project is in ideal continuity with "Artificialia", presented in 2021-22 in Correggio. If in the first exhibition Antonella De Sarno investigated the concept of deformity in its poetic meaning, to contrast it with the concept of normality, in the second the field widens to go beyond the discourse on the deformed and the deviant and tend up to a poetic dimension that embraces them both, without any need for distinction.
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Opening time
from Tuesday to Friday 15.00-18.00; Saturday, Sunday and holidays 10.00-13.00 and 15.00-18.00.
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The exhibition is part of the official program of " Identità Inquieta "

Philosopher by training, performer and visual artist, Antonella De Sarno comes from the theater of Pippo Delbono, with whom she trained and worked for a few years, and from contemporary dance, experiences that have transmitted to her the need for physical and conceptual rigor and the importance for the artist to fully expose himself in his truth. The sign, in its power of expression and communication, has a significant part in his language; the preparation of relational strategies between space, objects and bodies, the intimate and the social observed and subtly staged are at the center of his research. The installation “Faces from the Dark” (2020) received the jury's recommendation at the Premio Combat 2020 and the publication in the catalogue. In 2021 it is the video installation "Nebula" and in 2022 the graphic work "Curiositas I, Cavalli" to be reported by the jury of the same award and to enter the catalogue. Recent exhibitions include the one-man show "Artificialia", curated by Francesca Baboni and Stefano Taddei, set up in 2021-22 in the Sala dei Putti of the Palazzo dei Principi in Correggio (RE).

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Free entry