L.U.P.O. – Lorenzelli Projects, Milan
Giuditta Branconi
The work of very young artist Giuditta Branconi (born in 1998), originally from Abruzzo but now adopted by Milan, is presented to us as vivid, emblematic of delicate and flourishing beauty, with a distinctly feminine flavour, of a resolutely strong-willed and idyllic character, full of inner monologues, those typical of the so-called stream of consciousness. With the main objective of connecting with the surrounding globe, without excluding its dichotomous aspect, Branconi’s vibrant research initially captures modern symbols, images and icons, and then creates new and astonishingly personal visions composed of elements that are both angelic and lascivious, as well as dreamy and disturbing.
Branconi’s swirling and strongly identifiable painting is a veritable mise en scène in which the characters, the undisputed protagonists, often surrounded by rare species and a rich fauna, whirl around and hover harmoniously, making themselves increasingly ineffably unstoppable. On the basis of these premises, the Tarot de Marseille series was born, freely inspired by the so-called Tarot de Marseille or Marseilles Tarot, probably derived from those produced at the beginning of the 18th century by Jean Dodal in Lyon and Pierre Madenié in Dijon, which in turn derived from decks produced in Paris by the hands of various printers during the 17th century, such as Jacques Vieville and Jean Noblet: a symbolic synthesis of occult science, these 78 ancient Tarots de Marseille are a means of grasping all those universal laws that have always governed and guided man in matters of love, fortune, work, friendship and so on.
Giuditta Branoni, going through the entire analysis of esoteric, philosophical and theological symbolism typical of the subject matter, has wisely developed, in a rigorously pictorial key, a new symbolic alphabet through which she can narrate the multiple life stories that concern us all. In doing so, picture after picture, she attempts to create an obscure and intimate symbolic apparatus with which the viewer can deliberately and in a completely autonomous and personal manner confront himself, as is the case in the various attempts to read the tarot cards themselves, whose meaning is almost never unambiguous because it is shaped by the eyes of the beholder, in a constant and arduous attempt to steer the capricious fortune towards scenarios of prosperous positivity. To give life to this new series of works, Giuditta Branconi relies on fate, randomly drawing from the whole deck a sample of cards from which she hides new pictorial representations, a surprising combination of symbols and objects present in the tarot cards themselves, which are then masterfully transposed onto canvas, whose heavenly radius has not yet been defined.
