Margherita Manzelli

The all-female world of Margherita Manzelli fuses an exploration of the self and its acceptance. Her painted and drawn figures look out at the viewer with expressions of melancholy and wonder--the feelings of empathy that result are only natural. Yet the figures clearly conceal as much as they reveal. Manzelli is fond of using the Jungian concept of the "persona"--the image of ourselves we construct to face the world--to represent her own thoughts and identity. Paintings are usually constructed on three planes: the figure, the figure support and the background, which is often presented as a fluid, empty place. The figure shown is usually an evidently mute, still woman who confronts the viewer with penetrating eyes. There is almost an awkward, erotic edge composed of displacement, loneliness and discomfiting images. Each represented figure, a persona or alter ego, is both an intellectualized invention and a psychological projection. Manzelli does not work from photographs or live models, only her own imagination. Her work represents invented personas to which the artist reluctantly admits, "I would like them to be different from me. And yet I realize that this very desire is symptomatic of the fact that something of myself remains in them."