The Pelle series is presented to the public as a complete, unified body of work for the first time, summarizing and revealing years of the artist’s expressive investigation. Through a patient and obsessive gesture—systematically piercing sentimental fabrics, garments, and velvets with steel pins—Laura Patacchia alters the original nature of the material to generate true sculptural presences.
In this process, manual work and embroidery lose any purely domestic connotation to tap into deep personal and anthropological roots: the artisanal memory of iron and wood inherited from her father merges with the sartorial gestures of her mother and grandmother. The steel of the pins ceases to be a mere tool and becomes line and drawing, piercing the cloth to capture real light and reflect it back through its metallic sheen. At the same time, the alterations and oxidation of rust trace the variable of time onto the work, transforming suffering into an exorcising, healing ritual, and the textile support into an unapproachable, protective armor.
As Mara Predicatori highlights in her critical essay accompanying the exhibition:
“To call them skins means recognizing in the surface not a boundary, but an unstable threshold between inside and outside, conscious and unconscious, ornament and wound—perhaps even between desire and prohibition. An interstitial place where the absence of the body begins to turn into memory, presence, light.”
With the Pelle series, the artworks occupy Spazio Ulisse, creating an intense visual and tactile polarity: the material seduces the eye while simultaneously precluding physical contact, turning the gallery into a threshold between the intimate, profound dimension of the works and the public realm of the street.
