Lucia Giacani

What is fascinating is Lucia’s ability to impregnate their own artistic vision into every work, not due to a technique or for sheer self indulgence, but a vision that is capable of undermining the limits that photography today imposes on itself. The images are charged with a slight ironic nostalgia, pain also, and a soul searching that connects these figures to the great protagonists of western figurative art – from Bernini’s statues of Madonna with child to Warhol’s Edie Sedgwick – and allows them to escape sequentially to the habitually turned pages of glossy magazines where so much beauty cancels itself out in the act of commercialising everything that comes to hand. Turned into mannequins, these wonderful women become closer to themselves, questioning the role assigned to them, playing with their very existence by posing in staged surreal mise-en-scène that finally gives them life beyond a mere aesthetic: Lucia Giacani built for them – and also for herself – a den of fiction, forcing them to act, and to be themselves in virtue of the fact that they are impersonating someone else. A miracle of theater and art, and, with certain artists like Giacani, photography.’
Paolo Marasca, Cultural Minister, Ancona, Italy