Languid gazes. Stares. Blurred faces. Women who observe. Women observed. The eyes – “the mirror of the soul”- depicted by Guillermina De Gennaro enshrine a world. Or rather many worlds. As many as thoughts. Distantworlds, far from everyday reality, made of memory and dreams, desires and disappointments. Mysterious worlds hidden behind a look, worlds that the artist tries to reveal by dissolving with the brush the patina of fiction and exteriority, of the unsaid and of the conventions that surround life.

In the bold and proud, fearful and uncertain, nostalgic and mysterious looks of the characters portrayed by the artist, we findthe pale traces of memories, the sadness of abandonment, the melancholy of distance, the escapes of refusal.

And still, soft sensations and softemotions, fleeting shadows and flickering lights that surround close-ups and details of faces. Through paintings and digital paintings on canvas, paper or plastic (large-sized or small-sized sequences arranged in evocative spatial installations), Guillermina De Gennaro conveys the soft voice of visualconfessions,autobiographical and not, that are evanescent incorporeal appearances, fluid and mobile forms, real only for a few moments and always ready to fade. Through the anonymous or familiarlooks of friends and unknown women, the artist discovers the precious chance to escape the drabness of reality to enter a new dimension made up of thespaces of reflection and of the places of feeling. The eyes thus become a magic door to silently accessthe intimate world of the other, his past and his dream of the future. In fact, in the story generated by the mute dialogue of glances, a thousand stories are hidden, made up of untapped energies and imploded vitality, denied creativity and untold potential. This journey into the world of the beyond and elsewhere does not look like an escape, but like a search, a hard and slow search, which strengthens the traveler at each obstacle and enrichesher at each stage.

Especially in the emotional landscapes of the non-places of memory, the artist born in Argentina and Italian by adoption recoversher own little pieces of life, fragments of memory through which she manages to open a subjective aesthetic sensitivity to the collective perception, there where the personal experience establishes a dialogue with the viewer’s experience, up to givinga new sense and a new symbolic meaning to the general views of art.

Maria Vinella
Critical text for the solo exhibition “Fuerza en tus ojos” – Spazio Artefuoricentro, Rome, 2006; Galleria “Museo Nuova Era” – Bari, 2007.