Everything shall vanish without a trace.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
rounded with a little sleep”.
(The storm – W. Shakespeare)
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
rounded with a little sleep”.
(The storm – W. Shakespeare)
Dorothy Circus Gallery, in occasion of its fourth anniversary, brings back on the Italian contemporary art scene the artist Nicoletta Ceccoli with a solo exhibition entitled “Incubi Celesti” (“Heavenly Nightmares”), a tribute to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”. Nicoletta Ceccoli dedicates her exhibition to the childhood themes that vanish without leaving a trace and to that passage that leads the child into the adulthood. This show is a homage to dreams. Alice becomes the allegory of the Heavenly Nightmares of children that are inhabited by monsters and extraordinary adventures.
The morbid curiosity of exciting fear and anxiety that occurs before one wakes up and finds him- or herselves liberated from their dreams. A child girl, who appears with large grey eyes and a porcelain face, embraces in her arms numerous dolls, which represent many fragments of herself that no longer exist. These diaphanous colors stand out on a black background, which recounts the immense sense of emptiness and solitude hanging on the souls. A remedy to despair is therefore sought by filling in things living in a parallel reflected reality. The young girl imposes an impressive sense of cinematographic silence, as if she desires to share her most mysterious secrets with who stands before her.
The pained rabbit, such as a hades ferryman, brings his olde-worlde playfellow by the other landside, crossing sad waters full of toys, in order to arrive into adulthood: dreamlike atmospheres are suspended. The watcher, like Aeneas, descends into the underworld to see once again the world he lost, willing to belong to it again, but taking just a quick glance, without recalling the ghosts of the past. The serpents which wrap themselves around the slender bodies of young children, symbolize the sense of rationality without a soul, that grinds the ingenuity in a kind of review a of the Adam and Eve myth.
Using characters and forms of childhood language and putting under glass the adult fears, Nicoletta Ceccoli tells that delicate transition and the related absence of dreams, revisiting the themes of childhood, anthropomorphizing toys and landscapes, creating a new and complex cosmogony. In her ten unpublished acrylic on paper works, the key to psychoanalytic research of a constellation of symbols made of sugar, caramel, buttons and pins. This Italian artist has exhibited in many prestigious art galleries of “Pop Surrealism” from Seattle to Los Angeles, Toronto, Manchester and New York. She has aroused many positive responses and great interest from many of the most important collectors. Her artworks are true fragments of consuming and restless dreams, which will enrapt people in a total experience. Her meticulous technique and her use of delicate colors, create an atmosphere consisting of a rich composition in a world of fables, added to the true acknowledgement and experience of the femininity of a woman. The spectator is left with an immense need to dream again, holding in his eyes the children created by Nicoletta Ceccoli as a souvenir of a journey through twilight and dream.
