We are pleased to invite you to the public opening of EDICOLA480 with Cellophanee #7, featuring her single work on display “Holy Tears”.
Between the sacred and the profane, Holy Tears takes a familiar image and subjects it to a series of signs that disturb its stillness without erasing its power. The Marian figure retains her halo and distant gaze, yet the suffering she traditionally embodies exceeds all measure: it becomes blood, blade, flame, the presence of death. It is no longer simply contemplated; it is exposed.
And yet, the work does not rely on the shock of this transformation. What makes it less immediate is above all its materiality. Wool and various yarns give physical substance to a violent image through a soft, almost welcoming surface. What should wound invites us to come closer; what belongs to devotion takes on the features of a more restless, contemporary imagery. The visual experience becomes a form of ecstasy.
It is within this contradiction that the work finds its strength. The skull held tightly in her arms heightens the ambiguity: it may be a warning, a relic, a body to protect, or a foreign presence that has entered the icon. The gesture that embraces it also transforms an emblem of death into something intimate, almost something to be cherished. Nothing settles into a definitive meaning.
Holy Tears thus puts an image deeply embedded in collective memory to the test. It contaminates it, wounds it, gives it material form, without managing (or perhaps without intending) to exhaust its power. Beneath every layer, the Madonna continues to endure and to look back at us.
EDICOLA480 – the new independent art space developed and produced by 480 Site Specific and directed by Massimiliano Bastardo – was conceived as a minimal format: one work at a time, for 40–50 days. A display device that isolates in order to enhance, and subtracts in order to focus: an invitation to pause, return, and look again.
The work will remain on view 24/7 until December 1, 2026.
We look forward to welcoming you to this seventh appointment: come and see it, come back and look again, bring whoever you like! If you can’t make it to the opening, remember that the display window is accessible at any time: stop by whenever you want!
