Irene Pucci « Under the Skin »

Irene Pucci’s work is distinguished by an uncompromising gaze that captures the body in its visceral truth: curves, tensions, and deep shadows. The exhibition stems from encounters with women who have undergone experiences capable of profoundly altering their self-perception—whether illness, loss, violence, instability, an emotional transformation, or an existential crisis.
These are diverse experiences that leave their mark on both body and memory, yet they neither exhaust nor define the identities of those who lived through them. In *Sottopelle* (Beneath the Skin), Irene Pucci focuses her gaze on the time of transformation. The subjects of her photographs are portrayed neither as victims nor as mere exemplars of generic resilience, but as active agents of their own change. They are bodies that carry a history with them and, through that history, continue to generate new versions of the self.
The title *Sottopelle* identifies the symbolic space in which the artist’s inquiry unfolds: a dimension lying beyond the immediately visible, where the body becomes a sensitive surface upon which experience leaves its traces, while simultaneously serving as the site of an internal process. Photography thus constantly navigates between surface and depth, between what can be revealed and what remains held beneath the skin. A gesture, a posture, a scar, a glance, or even the way a person occupies space become clues to a deeper process. The body preserves what has occurred while, at the same time, heralding a new possibility.