For Mynerva, personal experiences, collective traumas, and individual desires converge within a practice that looks towards renewed perspectives of the past and present, and projects towards a future of hope and openness in the midst of our uncertain times. Engaging with the city and its layered history, Mynerva has conceived a new cosmology, a universe where systems capable of reflecting multiple trajectories come to life through painting.

Dealing with their own experience living with a chronic disease and guided by the insights of esoteric thought and magic – seen as tools to restore people’s confidence in their own strengths – Mynerva has grappled with the body, seeking to place it outside the dichotomous trajectory of sick and healthy. Referencing Susan Sontag, who defined the body and “its metaphors,” identifying all the social, cultural, and political constructs that infiltrate the definition of our own bodies, Mynerva gives life to a cosmic universe where the human being – an “holobite,” as Lynn Margulis defined it, an ecological entity traveling in synergy with everything around it – is understood as an organism where thousands of other organisms converge, where everything is intertwined.

Rather than confronting physical illness itself, the artist seeks to shape an authentic way to relate to it through coexistence and the structuring of a creative universe that renews the energies of those facing a social illness.

For the artist, the body is a medium through which to communicate a renewed need to reconcile mind and matter, the high and the low. Through an exploration of the relationship between Rome’s history and its most famous fresco cycles, Mynerva creates an immersive environment capable of transporting those who enter it into a new universe. This geography is expressed through a painterly lexicon where body parts proliferate beyond names and labels, inventing fluid anatomies that allude to the body as an integral part of a larger ecosystem. In the exhibition, each body is thus transformed into a system capable of accommodating new inhabitants and scenarios, emphasizing differences and the valorisation of universal coexistence.

Four circular canvases that resemble large rosettes cover the ceiling and lift the observer’s point of view. By contemplating the painting, the public is invited visually to a cosmic and divine plane, which transcends the boundaries between organic and mechanical, human and animal.

In this way, Mynerva creates a microcosm where painting, made of light and shadow and dense layers of colour, manifests openness towards a new future, blending with nature and the universe.

Alessio Antoniolli