Susana Serpas Soriano (El Salvador 1976, lives and works in Rome) solo exhibition shows several series of works created over the last few years.

The exhibition is curated by Nicola Davide Angerame and is entitled Oblio [Oblivion], a term with which the Italo-Salvadoran artist identifies the theoretical nucleus of a research that uses photography as a privileged tool to investigate the spiritual fall of modern man, his emotional restlessness and the idea of the museum as a place to pacify existential lacerations.

The exhibition presents around forty large works from the last five years of her work. They are cycles dedicated to different subjects: the body, architecture, taxidermied animals, anatomical waxes and collages.

Oblivion, according to the artist, refers to that slow and inexorable process of estrangement, which leads the individual “far from himself” to live tending to be estranged from himself, enveloped within a series of values and ideals proposed by a topicality now in the grip of surface games. 

“In Susana Serpas Soriano's work - says Nicola Davide Angerame - personal experience becomes a starting point for reflection on the human and the narration of the body takes place through a performativity induced in the subjects portrayed. The exhibition investigates the potential of the museum as a place of narration and fascination. Serpas Soriano's photography is wide-ranging: it investigates the landscape, nature and man, seeking to restore to the contemporary image the status of a reflective, emotive and emotional element, which the current civilization of images inevitably tends to inflate.”

The body is used by the artist as a language made up of expressions and impressions, like a wax table on which emotions and feelings are engraved.

The sense of bewilderment and the need for inner recollection are at the basis of this poetics that is also developed by using a peculiar theme such as anatomical wax, in use in stately museums and later in the Academies. Florence, and its Museo della Specola, preserves prodigious ones, some created by one of the greatest waxmakers in history, the Sicilian abbot Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (Syracuse, 1656 - Paris, 22 December 1701). Serpas Soriano portrays some of these waxes as examples of the naturalistic spectacle that is the organic body, a perfect and astonishing machine, operating beneath the skin that encloses it and holds it together.

“Anatomical waxes - the artist explains - were mainly created for scientific research purposes, i.e. for doctors and researchers of the time. Today they are replaced by photographic images. Those remained have thus become objects for their own sake, exhibited in museums for the visibility of a wide public made up mainly of schoolchildren and tourists.”

The skin and the body are made “talking” in the large prints dedicated to the captive “giants”, called Ikamatisslag, a word that in the Opata language, of southern Uto-Aztecan derivation, means “those who lie”. With it, Susana Serpas Soriano introduces the social critique, which starts from a denunciation of the individual as “the one who lies to himself”, the unwitting builder of a society founded on false myths and distorted ideals. Details of bodies, caught in existential spasms, are enlarged out of scale and framed within a perspective construction created by the artist.

“The subjects, the techniques, the shapes, the geometries, the volumes, the collages, go as in a great current in one direction, they must coexist with each other, as happens in life. I ask the viewer to be free to think in order to go beyond the deadly part of the soul, I ask for a lively attention to life that always needs to be understood.” Susana Serpas Soriano

Perspective was invented in Florence during the Renaissance and has become a major cultural element, with implications for our civilization recognized by many scholars and philosophers. Susana Serpas Soriano studies and reinterprets it, inventing simple optical instruments and using masks made of degrading shadows in order to create unprecedented depths in her images. This is an important stylistic aspect that unites the different cycles of works. It also appears, in a modular and constructive key, in the series Orizzonti [Horizons], dedicated to urban landscape and architecture, with aerial views of Athens or the frontal portrait of Villa Borghese in Rome.

This exhibition is also a tribute to Florence as the home of Renaissance culture, capable of modernizing society by inventing new ideas and bringing the individual to a new degree of freedom. For Susana Serpas Soriano, the museums of Florence become a place of meditation. However, it is not the great museums of Renaissance art that are her destination, but those of natural history. The series of portraits dedicated to taxidermied animals from the Specola Zoological Museum in Florence recover a sense of nature that becomes art, memory and loving preservation.

Another series on show is that of the Collage, a technique that the artist has developed extensively in previous exhibitions and is represented here by recent works housed in display cases in which associations of images and ideas develop. They unite man and nature in a dialogue that for the Italo-Salvadoran artist represents a plentiful harvest of stimuli and reflections. (Nicola Davide Angerame)