Laura Aprile – MAGNIFICAT

29 November 2024 – 31 January 2025

SACRA ET PROFANA AD ESCERNENDUM
The naked, conventionally understood, has always represented in the history of visual arts the
a starting point for awareness of one's existence. Laura Aprile resumes painting
academic, of which the genre has been subject and gives a sensitive and original interpretation
capable of capturing new openings.
Mimesis of nature itself, Gea, generator mother, the naked woman becomes man’s life and origin
and also manifests itself as sensual and triggering force of human impulses, in the manifestation
of eros through the free expression of self, in the total triumph of the beauty of the body.
Highlighting the iconographic link with the theme of Venus to which the artist evokes, in
pose and in the seductive nudity, the universal concepts of love and feminine beauty.
It is an effect far from implied by an excess of vanity and perfection to outline the connection
between conscious and unconscious.
Naked is the truth, declares the iconology of Cesare Ripa: "A naked maiden with veils round about,
to prove that it must be covered, and adorned so that with words, that it is not
Remove the appearance of his beautiful, and delicate body, and of himself more than anything else adorns
It's getting rich."
Simple and natural, stripped of veils or garments, the truth is itself without disguises, sincere.
The use of the nude is charged with a deeper value that manifests itself in the will to strip itself
by all conventions and superstructures, heavy and intrusive, masks imposed by the company or
from insecurities, to resist in the transparency of one's identity. The body becomes the shell
that protects the soul, keeps it as a sacred effigy in the altar of a temple. The artist seems
performing brazenly casually, deceives the observer who, admiring her in total harmony
of his nakedness, he deludes himself to grasp its intimate nature. Indeed, it remains well hidden in silence
of a denied gaze, protected by the simulacrum of so much magnificence that, like a wall, separates
from the outside.
Observing these creatures has wrapped themselves in mystery; the nature of the
beauty suspended, in tension between appearance and essence, on showing or hiding but even more
interesting is to understand whether this implicit denial is directed outward or inward,
on the horizon of a not complete acceptance of the self in balance between naive fear and scalitiate
desire for discovery.
Opening and closing characterize the works that seem to embody the sides of the dualism inherent
in mankind from the beginning: Sacred and profane. Ambiguity that marks the woman, victim and executioner,
witch and angel, projecting it into an indecipherable sense of loss.

It is the profound investigation of the female essence, understood as an ideal figure in which to identify itself
and that the artist lives in an autobiographical representation that results in recognition
of self-consciousness.
The style matured by Laura is realized in the naturalness of the meat that turns on through a
warm and bright tonalism.
The figure is almost always completely naked, the silky and sophisticated draperies stand out on the
dark background and amplify in detailed plots that draw from the Flemish tradition and
from erotic iconography, they tie the female to the warm feeling, exalt the theatricality in the scene.
Venus is born from the petals of a flower blossoming, revealing, like a pearl, the preciousness
of his creature.
The composition is intensified of multiple values, it is pushed into the vision whose echoes dissolve in the
history of man. The serpent refers to original sin, guilt but is also rebirth,
life after death and knowledge.
Each reading level does not exclude the other; indeed it is very likely that the artist wanted to play
to invite the viewer to a deep analysis becoming mirror of the metamorphosis of existence
human.

Elisabetta Leporelli
Art History