FRANCESCOVEZZOLI(b. 1971)Doña Diabla (The Devil Is A Woman).Color laserprint on canvas with metallic embroidery in artist's frame.Framed 23 ¾ x 19 ¼ in. (60.3 x 48.9 cm).Executed in 2002.This work is unique and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.Provenance
Gio Marconi Gallery, MilanExhibited
Porto, Museu Serralves: Museu de Arte Contemporañea, Francesco Vezzoli, January 22-April 10, 2005"The art of embroidery, for Francesco Vezzoli is the measure of a distance, the link to a forgotten past and the obsessive scheme of his desires. Vezzoli restores the faces of cinematic divas with petit point by drowning and submerging the surfaces of the melancholic icons of a lost splendor. With his needle and thread, he traces the vestiges of tears and the blood onto the canvas. These gestures transform the artist into a new Theseus, overcoming the labyrinth's deceits through Ariadne's precious gift. The insistence of Vezzoli's thread is a refined strategy that reunites him with a path leading back to a yearned world. The beauty of the characters staged in Vezzoli's nostalgic and imaginary world—whether borrowed from the pages of a magazine or gleaned from a film still—is both violated and enriched by a revelatory parade of torments and languishes. Rather than portraits, they appear to be phantoms captured by the taut strength of a thread. Through the Needle's multiple turns and jumps over the canvas, the artist links the images to characters from films, novels or operas whose biographical details begin to intertwine with his own. He uncovers those elements that for an embroidered are not mere coincidences, but revelatory points of a weft. Vezzoli realizes that the practice of embroidery is both serial and discreet, almost like an esoteric code emerging through flashes like scenes in a Luchino Visconti film."
G. Franco taken from J. Winkelman, ed., The Needleworks of Francesco Vezzoli, Ostfildern- Ruit 2003, p. 57