Iliad and Odyssey

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The project he brings to the exhibition today has the flavor of myth and eternity. Homer's characters - from the Iliad and the Odyssey - are the pretext for a series of portraits born of an iconographic research omnivorous and unprejudiced. If Hector, the hero of Troy, is a game of intertwining that makes the face, helmet, cloak, arm arm and sword almost an abstract symphony - a feeling emphasized by the fact that he chose for him the diptych solution - Elena is the girl next door, with blond hair that frames her face in two bands and her gaze low, almost shielding herself, perhaps intimidated by the responsibility of being the "most beautiful woman in the world"; while for Achilles the artist decides to perform a purely pop operation, and with the refined precision of his threads he reconstructs the turned biceps and the unmistakable gaze of Brad Pitt in Wolfgang Petersen's film Troy.
The Iliad takes on mild, almost fairy tale-like tones for Lucchini, then, but in the Odyssey the artist chooses a darker register and the dark - dark - tones he confesses to prefer. The gaze of Poseidon, fixed in that of the viewer, enchains us the moment we stand before his face frowning, and the figure of Odysseus, from the side - defined by the powerful musculature of his shoulders and the arm raised in a gesture of defiance - appears to us in a second moment, almost swallowed by the blue of the sea that spreads throughout the work's space. The Siren, still a diptych, possesses a sensuality dark, deadly, and the beauty of the silhouette chiseled by the threads stretched by the artist is immediately contradicted by the human skull resting next to her long, scaly tail and especially by the shadow of the boat on the horizon, a felucca that communicates to us a sense of abandonment, of death, as if it were drifting now emptied of its sailors, who have fallen into the trap of the voice that leads to madness.
But Circe is the undisputed queen. Far more dangerous - and more beautiful - than Helen, she addresses us with a smile slight, barely lifting the corners of her mouth. Her eyes are white, empty, and it is with a vague fear that we dare to look at them, certain that crossing their gaze will lead us to death, like those of the basilisk. And it is the halo, the artist's brilliant touch: a blue halo that breaks the dark background on which equally dark hair emerges. A ring of infernal luminescence, the antithesis of sanctity; the sign of recognition of a witch who leaves no escape but in whose arms man will want to throw himself anyway, nullify himself forever, whatever the pain to be suffered, unable of evading the delights of that spell.

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Alessandra Redaelli