Stationary pendulum, senseless journey.

Lost suitcase - reversed mirror

And in the anteroom He who waits

And bears the color of our times on the trunk

Giorgio de Chirico, Birth of the mannequin, 1938

Emanuela Giacco's imaginary world comes alive in an indefinite space that is easy to perceive as infinity. Without borders, if not those of the four sides of the canvas, his representations are animated by mannequins and objects, masks and human figures that emerge from dark backgrounds unfolding on planes rich in form and color. Often magnified in comparison to the other elements, his warm and well-formed human figures try to reaffirm their belonging to our reality. They land with this intention, however, in a world whose dream narrative upsets any return to normality.

There is no doubt that the dramatic structural setting of the representation increases the emotional impact of the scenes. The evocation or suggestion of an indefinable distance is an artifice often used by the surrealists who had grasped it in Giorgio de Chirico's first metaphysical paintings: urban visions with distant perspectives and a strong meditative and poetic pathos. These spaces that can be understood but not identifiable with a natural dimension, as in the paintings considered here, offer a strong theatricality to the scenes represented. The illogicality of the dream does not take long to be perceived in visions whose real protagonists are small industrious drawing mannequins who act as accomplices, sometimes as antagonists, with the human figures.

The artist's pictorial technique, versatile, precise and loose in the construction of forms, rich in chromatic choices, also lends itself to the definition of extremely pleasing decorative elements, ornaments and weaves that give further expression to his painting with a background rhythmic, almost tribal, to its fantastic creatures.

Katherine Robinson.