The New Empire: Lily Moore and Sarah Powers

22nd may – 15h july 2021
OPENING 22nd MAY 10:00 a.m.
DAFNA Gallery
Via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi 76, Naples

Curated by Maurizio Elettrico

From 22 May, and in collaboration with the Fondazione Morra, the DAFNA Gallery presents a new exhibition project by Maurizio Elettrico. In the role of curator, the artist brings part of his larger project, ‘The New Empire’, to the DAFNA for the first time in an exhibition specially designed for the event.

With ‘The New Empire’, Elettrico first creates an imaginary place where the most diverse artistic languages are united by the precise intent to tell stories whose fanciful representation becomes – at the same time – food for thought and an investigation of reality.

Lily Moore and Sarah Powers are the imaginary artists from a distant future through whom Elettrico speaks to the public by offering the viewer a medium of great pictorial intimacy. His use of pencil, bold colours, and imaginary shapes translates the intent to trigger continuous emotions in the viewer and ensures that the spectator’s gaze is unconsciously involved in an ongoing process rousing a thirst for knowledge and curiosity.

Like two shamans, the characters use art to explore the subtle aspects of nature, from volatile entities set to guard beings and things, protecting them from chaos, to others born to instigate chaotic and destructive feelings in the hearts of animals and men.

By exhibiting three canvases and three painted cards, Maurizio Elettrico entrusts to the artistic vein of Lily Moore the representation of an aesthetic world halfway between the fanciful Middle Ages and graphic naturalism, where benign creatures come to life despite their ferocious and monstrous appearance; they are guardians of light, protectors of purity and the highest good. Through Sarah Powers, on the other hand, he projects us into the dimension of primitivism via intense transgression in the formal development of his subjects. We see two large canvases and two gardens – places where fantastic-looking natural forms can be placed alongside much more frightening creatures.

If, on the one hand, the creatures of Lily and Sarah appear to be deeply antagonistic, the artist succeeds in communicating meaning through both languages. He transmits his profound interest in history and science, drawing the public into an imaginary tale suspended between dream and reality.

Maurizio Elettrico was born in Naples, where he lives and works, in 1965. After studying the natural sciences, he directed his artistic research mainly towards the interdisciplinary relationships between philosophy, history, and iconography. His art is remarkable for the variety of materials he uses and the lexicon he employs, ranging from drawings on the finest paper, to sculpture and multi-material installations blending organic and artificial materials, to video, performance, and a copious written output. Elettrico invests the everyday world with a neo-mythological vitality in which the radical secularization of the sacred and science fiction interweaves to create a short circuit where the sense and non-sense of his poetics create a continuous balance between reality and dream. The rediscovery of dissonant forms and materials opens up a magical world of medieval ascendency to produce a visual pantheon that blends artistic creation and scientific knowledge.