"Homo sum" (I am a man) is the missing part of the quote: (Homo sum), humani nihil a me alienum puto, from Terence's Heauton timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor), which has been selected as the title of Irene Raspollini's solo show. That sentence, "I am a man", or better "I am a human being", encompasses the intimate sense of art and its exploratory and aggregative role. Terence's comedy narrates the incomprehension between a father and a son, which compells the latter to leave his home to become a mercenary in Asia.

The lack of empathy, the generation gap, the different point of views and perception of time are some of the causes of the fractured present we're living in. Art is called to show us the unifying perspectives of our times and set a comforting and projective point of view: human beings experienced crisis and contrasts, but humanness survived, enriched by diversity and sedimented experiences and relational skills. It's too easy to drown in passéism, or to project the acceptation of this kind of humanity in a future manipulated by our disenchanted present.

Confronting ourselves with these portraits of young people in their own times, leads us into the artist's investigative vision, following her quest for finding patiently and kindly their present. Whichever is, has been or will be their destiny, Irene freezes them while they're about to smile, suspended in a moment between scars and hopes. She invites us to discover their gaze, which is often averted or even denied, and look beyond, searching elsewhere the intimate sense of identity. Bodies communicate: they merge and connect what happened or what is about to happen to them.

Bodies as places, physical spaces, containers of emotions and ambitions which contribute effectively to knowledge and to the substance of emotions. Therefore, bodies are the ultimate autobiographical and artistic places, where self can be experimented before revealing it, sharing it.

As a consequence, the artistic exploration represents the intrinsic possibility to find the way to beauty, to a better humanness, even if sometimes it may not be the cleanest path. It's not a coincidence that all the portraits are of young people: as Terence's Clinia did, they'll come back from their battles and get rid of elderly Menedemuses, because the future is theirs (thank goodness).

Sandro Fracasso