Marta Dell’Angelo’s large-scale work Cariatidi (Caryatids), 2012, draws inspiration from her image archive of female nudes, which comprises nearly ten thousand pictures. The black-and-white piece is made from nearly one thousand sheets of A4 format paper and spreads out over the entire length of a gallery wall. While the title of the work evokes the immobile, mute, and inexpressive female figures that serve as a columnar support in ancient Greek architecture, Dell’Angelo here inserts a feminist critique, incorporating active bodies––images of women in motion–– into her passive figures.
As in her past work, Cariatidi betrays an analytic spirit: here, a lining up of women in various postures, all nude as if serving as objects of scientific, pornographic, or media attention. Each pose has been pieced together like a puzzle, from numerous components: By overlapping multiple sheets of paper, Dell’Angelo has produced a vibrant and mobile surface of bodies that appear to be continuously taken apart and recomposed. When viewed up close, the images meld into an abstraction of lines. It is as if Dell’Angelo is proposing that a fragmented body has its own grammar, and she seems to insist that this language must be continually rewritten.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
