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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Tate Britain, London

Beyond the Canvas

Jan 21
1 min

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Tate Britain, London

In my mind, a portrait is the depiction of an actual person, someone who has lived. Their portrait was made so their story could be told and so we would know about them, learn about their life. But what happens if the painting, like in the case of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's work, is of a fictional person, someone who only exists in the artist's imagination? Well, I guess perhaps that's the representation of humanity at large. It is none of us and all of us. What I realised whil

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Football, human rights, fossil fuels and geopolitics.

Beyond the Canvas

Nov 25, 2022
1 min

Football, human rights, fossil fuels and geopolitics.

The 22nd FIFA World Cup has kicked off. Italy did not qualify for the event, which I'm now almost pleased about as it's all turning into an awful mess for a number of rather obvious reasons. Corruption. Despite the absence of a definitive smoking gun, there is strong evidence that the bidding process was rigged (not for the first time) and that, much to no one's surprise, hefty bribes were paid. Workers' exploitation. The astronomical $220 billion infrastructure budget was ke

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Simone Leigh's Sovereignty at the U.S. Pavilion, Venice Biennale

Beyond the Canvas

Nov 20, 2022
1 min

Simone Leigh's Sovereignty at the U.S. Pavilion, Venice Biennale

"I like the idea of thinking of femininity as something solid and enduring rather than always something fragile and weak." - Simone Leigh As the 59th of the Venice Biennale draws to a close, I'm looking at the photos I took (they are decent, for once) of Simone Leigh's large-scale sculptural work and I'm having some belated thoughts. Leigh's figurative sculptures in bronze and ceramic (the latter is her medium of choice) illustrate her relentless focus on the exploration and

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Beyond the Canvas

Aug 14, 2022
2 min

The issue of (female) ageing

You know when you're having a conversation with a friend and the following day you read something that exactly echoes your thoughts articulating them better than you ever could? This morning I randomly found this interview on Libération, in which French writer and journalist Laure Adler states: Je suis vieille et je vous emmerde, meaning I am old and you can go to hell/I don't give a sh*t what you think (translations are seldom straightforward). Adler goes on to say exactly w

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A nameless painting and a story of new beginnings

Beyond the Canvas

Jul 24, 2022
2 min

A nameless painting and a story of new beginnings

Antonio Pedrazzi was a family man, a husband, a father of four. After studying at Bologna University to become an agronomist, he worked as an insurance executive. Life, as you know, has a way of taking you places you never planned to go. After his wife died, he decided to become an artist. Antonio was serious about it, he wanted to be formally trained and learn how to paint. So he turned up at the local Accademia and convinced the professors to allow him to attend their class

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Beyond the Canvas

Jul 16, 2022
1 min

Donatello at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

If there is an equivalent of Zoom fatigue for art shows, I 100% suffer from it. The ridiculous speed at which I move from one room to the other is incompatible with any coherent understanding of what's before my eyes. The best I can hope for is that adequate appreciation is happening on an unconscious level, but as far as retention and analysis go, they are sketchy at best. The one marvellous thing I did take away from the Donatello exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi , is a renewe

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Sarah Ball (et al.) at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Beyond the Canvas

Jul 9, 2022
1 min

Sarah Ball (et al.) at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

There is a milky evanescence to this mesmerising portrait by British artist Sarah Ball, and the longer I stood in front of it, the more it was drawing me in. There is nothing conventional or normal about Emma. Look at the size of the head, the length and thickness of the white eyelashes, the texture of the hair, the clownish quality of her makeup, the uber plump lips. Her shimmery face is odd and beautiful, her eyes aloof and alluring. She looks fake but feels real, her gaze

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Roe vs Wade overturned: The relentless erasure of women's rights.

Beyond the Canvas

Jun 25, 2022
2 min

Roe vs Wade overturned: The relentless erasure of women's rights.

They've only gone ahead and done it. I'm not even going to get into why those late SCOTUS appointments were so crucial. You know why. Nor am I going to tackle the absurd pro-life vs pro-gun debate. Because what happened yesterday is all about meddling with women's reproductive rights, it's all about control. But also about social status and race. This decision winds back the clock almost 50 years, removing the right to safe pregnancy termination from millions of women. Aborti

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Beyond the Canvas

Jun 8, 2022
1 min

In memoriam: Paula Rego (1935 - 2022)

Paula Rego died today. The art world has lost one of the greats. I'm so glad I got to see her some of her work one more time at the Venice Biennale, where it inhabits an entire room in the Central Pavillion. Rego didn't paint to please the viewer, she painted to unsettle them. Her pictures tell uncomfortable, ambiguous, and sometimes downright disturbing stories that we struggle to make sense of. And the longer we stand in front of them, the more we are intrigued and confused

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Beyond the Canvas

Jun 2, 2022
1 min

On Italian National Day, 02/06/2022

On 11 June 1946, the Italian people voted in an institutional referendum to replace the monarchy with a republic. I won't lie, it was closer than I like to think, but they did it: 12,672,767 votes for the Republic vs 10,688,305 for the Monarchy. Importantly, this was also the first time that women voted at national level. As the journalist Anna Garofalo recalls: "The ballots that arrived at home inviting us to do our duty had a silent and peremptory authority. We turned them

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Beyond the Canvas

Jan 3, 2022
2 min

The universality of misogyny

"When I went to New York in 1992, I recognized that there was a genre called installation art, and had an idea that I will pop out from walls. I wanted to pop out from walls, from stuffy walls." -Yun Suk-nam Reminiscent of the Dadaist and Surrealist objects that lost their function to be transformed into something attractive and unsettling, the Godmother of Korean Feminist Art has produced beautifully upholstered armchairs and sofas that you cannot sit on. I love the contrast

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Beyond the Canvas

Dec 22, 2021
2 min

Drunk on art.

Whether it’s the first one or the latest of many, a visit to Florence’s Uffizi is bound to leave you breathless. Such are the quality and the breadth of its collection, it’s like embarking on a relentless quest for the best picture, with the disarming awareness that it’s impossible to pick one. So you just keep going, room after room, masterpiece after masterpiece, soaking it all in until you’re almost drunk. Hoping that at least a tiny fragment of the exhilarating energy tha

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Beyond the Canvas

Nov 27, 2021
1 min

The human cost of Black Friday

It's that time of year again, the retail bonanza that is Black Friday is upon us. Although there have been warnings that in 2020 more than 90% of alleged super deals were actually the same price or cheaper in the six months prior the sales event, an estimated 60% of adults in the UK will be making purchases for a total of £8.7 billion. Deleting my Amazon account just over a year ago was one of my proudest and self-righteous consumer moments. My brother mocks me for my micro r

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Beyond the Canvas

Nov 24, 2021
2 min

Safe and legal routes for refugees NOW

'My piece is not talking about old slave ships; it's about what happens today' says Romuald Hazoumé about his multimedia installation 'La Bouche du Roi' (The King's Mouth), now on show at the Rijksmuseum’s Slavery exhibition. Finally, the museum world starts tackling its colonial past and attempts to tell the true story of how the Golden Age of European imperialism came about and flourished. The Beninese artist shaped over 300 petrol cans into tribal masks and piled them up t

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Viva Vittoria: knitting against violence

Beyond the Canvas

Oct 9, 2021
1 min

Viva Vittoria: knitting against violence

Violence against women and girls is a human rights violation and a public health epidemic. It occurs daily across the world and is widely underreported. Globally, an estimated 736 million women aged 15 and older have been subjected to some sort of physical, sexual or psychological violence at least once in their life. That's almost 1 in 3 of us. Thanks to the generosity of knitters from all social and cultural backgrounds, since 2015 Viva Vittoria has been covering Italy's mo

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Speaking truth to power: the legacy of Anna Politkovskaya

Beyond the Canvas

Oct 7, 2021
2 min

Speaking truth to power: the legacy of Anna Politkovskaya

It's been 15 years to the day since Anna Politkovskaya was murdered for fearlessly and relentlessly telling the truth. Anna was gunned down in the entrance hall of the block of flats where she used to live in Moscow. An investigative journalist with Novaya Gazeta, Anna was a staunch human rights advocate and a strident critic of the Kremlin. I have read all her books, often struggling to make sense of a reality that is far, far away from mine. "A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter

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Beyond the Canvas

Sep 4, 2021
2 min

Women who defend themselves

At long last, my reading drought has come to an end. I am currently re-reading the original version of The Life Before Us written in 1975 by French author Romain Gary under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar. This extraordinary novel tells the story of Momo, the abandoned child of a prostitute, the mother he will never know. Mere pages into this second reading, I was reminded that Gary used the verb 'se defendre', to defend oneself, to describe what prostitutes do. I am puzzled by t

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Beyond the Canvas

Aug 1, 2021
2 min

The memory of open wounds

There are wounds so deep they never really heal. They are the wounds we share with other people, whether we know them or not, the wounds that remain open no matter how long it's been since they were inflicted. These wounds define us, they speak of who we are and where we come from. This is the story of one of these wounds. On the morning of Saturday 2 August, at 10:25am, a time bomb hidden in an unattended suitcase detonated inside Bologna railway station. The explosion was s

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Marcus Rashford, footballer, leader, change-maker and all-round beautiful human being.

Beyond the Canvas

Jul 15, 2021
2 min

Marcus Rashford, footballer, leader, change-maker and all-round beautiful human being.

It's not the first time that this blog talks about Marcus Rashford. The 23-year old mancunian footballer used his social media platform to twice force the Government into a U-turn over the extension of free school meals and support grants for children from low-income families. Just thinking about that needing to happen makes my skin crawl, but that's Tory Britain for you. Rashford used to rely on those meals, he has spoken very openly about having to sometimes go to sleep wit

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Nicola Samorì - Sfregi, Palazzo Fava, Bologna

Beyond the Canvas

Apr 29, 2021
1 min

Nicola Samorì - Sfregi, Palazzo Fava, Bologna

"I try to make bright paintings, but every time I fall into the shadows, maybe because darkness is the ultimate condition of things, whereas light is only temporary." - Nicola Samori in an interview to Art Tribune Darkness and light. Oh how they coexist and engage in an epic struggle in Samori's striking body of work, which is uniquely atmospheric and haunting. It is clear he is a classically trained painter, and a very good one he is, too. His bold brushstrokes sweep across

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