From these paintings, a parade of mysterious and beautiful women who look at us, wink, invite
Unconventional, asymmetrical shots. Views play upon enlarging anatomical details. Not faces, but details of faces, glimpsed upon as if they were landscapes.
Embodiments, which in their oil painting form, maintain the simplicity of black and white photography and are exasperated by a dimension very near to a blow-up. The only notes of colour: hints of teal and marine blue, almost transparent, defining the eyes, and the fiery red lips and sometimes nails. An absolute, provocative and cheeky red, which stuns and exalts, like the beauty, so perfect as to seem abstract, of these women.
Who are the mysterious creatures who scrutinize, eye and invite us from Cinzia Pellin’s canvases? We recognise some of them. We seem to have already seen them in the glossy pages of a fashion magazine, a fashion show, perhaps in Milan, or perhaps in Florence. There is Anita Eckberg, captured in the explosiveness of her gushing sensuality, as if just out of the set of Dolce Vita after the Fontana di Trevi scene. Then there is here: the voluptuous, blinding Marilyn Monroe, the woman par excellence, the myth.
For her, the eternal game of seduction does not risk turning into a constraint. Hers are rather subject women
The most desirable lover in the world, friend of the powerful who sustained that her being liked by truckers would have sufficed, and who ended up giving sleepless nights and firing the imagination of generations of men. The actress often appears in these canvases, in a sort of magnificent obsession, which with her soft, slow gestures alludes to a surrender, but are instead, of conquest. With her mouth slightly parted and a look fixed upon the lens, as if she were making love with the camera.
There is also a friend, recently offering herself to model and meekly buckle to the artist’s direction, who suggests hairstyles, herself applying the makeup. She says: Put yourself like this, look at, turn, let down your hair, smile.
Like a baroque painter, she loves the coup de théàtre
At this point, a coup de théâtre takes place. From the artificiality of a pose, something that transcends fixed expressions and gestures unexpectedly passes through. Pellin’s background in set design gives rise to paintings having a set design effect which is nothing other than seduction and wonder.
In the 17th century, she would have been a splendid baroque painter, probably persecuted by the tribunal for inquisition for the triumphant lust which transpires from her paintings. Last century, hardcore critics would have turned their noses up at her, as for them, strangely, social commitment equates to aesthetic ugliness when not equated with misogyny. She would also have made the most orthodox of feminists frown upon her, obsessively trying to uncover objectified women everywhere, especially if charming.
His scenographic training is declined in works with scenic effect
Fortunately for Pellin, she arrives after these periods of excesses. She is a young, self-aware, and intelligent artist. For her, the eternal game of seduction does not run the risk of becoming constraint. Hers are rather subject women. They retake possession of their femininity and sexuality and learn once again how to enchant.
They have dismissed the confessor and the psychoanalyst. Simply, they desire and love to be desired. They go back to listening to their grandmothers’ tricks. They make themselves beautiful. Often maniacally so. They alternate between haughtiness and weakness, melancholy and joy, acquiescence and elusiveness, tears and laughter.
Not faces but details of faces, glimpsed upon as if they were landscapes
They expose their long, white necks, they near a finger to predictably expert ruby, full lips. They allude, sigh. The distant air of one who, conscious of her power, pretends to not care. Or on the contrary, they look with unconcealed shyness, languidly, furtively, up and down. The women of the third millennium, with feelings, contradictions, secrets which are those of today and of always.
So while this painter seems to paint portraits, she undresses the soul.
