In Dacia Manto' s works  nature no longer appears before us only as something to protect, care for and love but becomes the body of our body: it does not just look at us, but it touches us, lives in us, it penetrates into our imagination, leaving in us a sense of wonder and subtle emotion. And upsetting as well as fascinating, is the term Luciferine that Dacia Manto has chosen as the title of her solo exhibition at the gallery Artopia. A title that is ambiguous, ambivalent, seductive, because on one hand it seems to want to evoke Lucifer, that is to allude to that thin and dark connotation of the underworld present in her  work. But on the other hand, and quite to the contrary it refers us to fireflies, which can shine in their nocturnal dances of love with their supply of luciferin, a chemical agent that provides some organisms  with the phenomenon of bioluminescence. Fragile light, delicate, elusive, emerging from the darkness and into the darkness absorbed, after drawing a phosphorescent doodle, shiny as an indecipherable message, or maybe decipherable as an invitation to stand facing into the dark, looking for traces of grace, hope,  brightness in the most marginal and neglected spaces. So Luciferine is the perfect title for this exhibition, where the artist offers some significant yet little known works from her artistic career, such as the video Planiziaria (2009), shot in the Po Delta, is based on a continuous play of inter-penetration and metamorphosis, in which nature fades away from the marvelous to the unsettling, the painful. And above all she is showing many new works, made ​​ especially for the occasion, with which she transforms the gallery space into a place-threshold, which comes into relation with the neglected natural elements of the surroundings.

 

 

Gigliola Foschi