Domenico Grenci. I’ll be your mirror

Catalog created on the occasion of the homonymous exhibition, edited by Sandro Parmiggiani, at the New Morone Gallery, Milan, 21 January – 19 March 2016.

In an almost obsessive investigation of the female face, in every possible declination, Grenci represents its irreducible variety, its uniqueness, its constant charm, beyond the manipulations of makeup that sometimes hide its authenticity and intimate truth. The figures portrayed by Domenico Grenci float in a dimension outside of time, devoid of any material and contingent reference. The scene they insist on is emptiness, devoid of any spatial or temporal reference, magnetically inhabited by woman. Grenci's female faces seem to resurface from an ancient photograph, corroded by time. It's bitumen, poor and paradoxically heavy material, to create an effect of indefinite and incomplete estrangement, similar to that evoked by a blurry or faded image. The artist tries to capture something hidden in these disturbing and enigmatic faces that pose questions to which perhaps there is no answer; with profound respect for the female universe, which is delicate and sensual, vulnerable and strong at the same time, and trying to extrapolate its essence, in all its nuances. He implements what he himself defines as an "elevatio animae", which becomes a sort of compensation for that identity offended by the commodification of the body and ephemeral beauty.

Definitely talented designer - who seems to look, among the many possible suggestions that could be mentioned, a Egon Schiele, Manolo Valdés and Marlene Dumas –, Grenci chose to use a completely unusual material, he bitumen, whose gloom leaves, inside the body and on the edges of the form, halos of mystery, exudations that prolong the echo, diluting the peculiar features of a face in the void of canvas or paper, until they become a sort of apparition that fascinates us and that we are induced to scrutinize and introject, before it dissolves, losing its memory forever.