(In)conscia Veritas

Liquid art system presents the first display of the joint project by Elisa Anfuso and Alessandra Lanzafame. The project is more than an exhibition, it is a launch to the public, a visual exchange between the two artists. An open exchange that is temporarily on display at Positano gallery.

For several years, the two artists have been exchanging ideas about topics related to their own independent research and, inevitably, this exchange left traces on their individual works: Elisa Anfuso’s paintings and Alessandra Lanzafame’s photographs.

The latter has often been one of the models and muses for Elisa Anfuso’s paintings, who uses Lanzafame’s face to convey her emotions and contents to the audience. Over time, Elisa has not only observed and portrayed Alessandra’s face and eyes, but she has also started to observe the world through those eyes… eyes that express themselves and set their own point of view through the creative use of a camera.

Photography and painting influence each other in an endless reference to topics, subjects and meanings.

There is also a common source in the work of both artists: the unconscious. A source which is also a subject to be portrayed. Both artists move from autobiographic elements, starting their research from the deep observation of their inner being, letting the unconscious elements surface.

The canvas for the one and the paper for the other become “filters” where the inner visions are projected and express themselves through an allegorical language that comes from the unconscious. Hence, personal history becomes potentially universal because it is made of the same lights and same shadows that fill up the “depth” of every human being.

The allegorical visions portrayed by Elisa Anfuso and Alessandra Lanzafame draw from that collective imagination we all know, because it animates the world of dreams, creates dreamlike and spiritual visions.

Along the sides of the octagonal room of the Liquid Gallery in Positano, the individual works of each artist are on display, letting their small personal obsessions and recurring motifs surface, which can be observed in their fullest expression in the joint work shown on the central wall in the back of the room (Genesis II that is The incubator – The spring of consciousness).

It is a large illustrated tale, where photography and painting intersect, made of two parts linked by an underlying theme that represents the evolution. On the one side, there is the biological, unaware, condition of the human being; on the other side, there is the awakening of the consciousness, where the mind becomes aware of the Self (represented in its triple structure according to the Freudian conception: Id, Ego and Super-Ego).