Invited to invest the gallery’s space of Annamaria Maggi, the artist proposes a site-specific intervention, never seen before, in the main room of the gallery. In this wide closed space, Letizia Cariello draws seven windows, each one in a different style from the Gothic double arch window to the simple modernist rectangle. Hand drawn by the artist on tracing paper, the seven windows are transposed from the sheet to the wall with nails fixed along the outline of their shapes. Between one nail and another, Letizia Cariello weaves a red thread (her distinctive mark) creating coloured grids.

The gallery’s space has now its openings that still remain virtual, because the only physical element that marks them is a weaved red thread that evokes a closure. Or it affirms a double tension: the desire to be intimately close in oneself, which become in turn the condition of an opening toward the external, to otherness. The window testifies this: it is part of an architecture that encloses but that necessary looks outside open to a continuous of relations. A border is traced to be crossed: Letizia Cariello tells us that a grid is not always a metonymical sign of a prison, and she quotes Santa Caterina da Siena: «Make yourself a mind-room, where only you can go». «A protected place from where observing», says the artist, ready to be also observed.

Born in Copparo (province of Ferrara), Letizia Cariello lives and works in Milan, where she currently teaches Anatomical Drawing at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Her research explores through different practices and media (drawing, installation, photography, sculpture, video…), the relationship between inner and outer space. Her attempt to capture the consistency of time focuses on the chase of the traces left by its flow by writing them (the calendars) on objects and matters. Aim of this process is a continuous performance to re-construct connections, relations and bonds (the red thread) through the identification and the real seam of objects and spaces, both in macro and micro dimensions: from trees to teapots, from small cups to embroidered photographs.

Seven Gates

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