BARBARA CAPPONI / BABAS

MLB Maria Livia Brunelli Gallery,

Ferrara
24 March – 1 June 2024
curated by Maria Livia Brunelli

Before love comes attention. Attention, and the sense of wonder: the open gaze that allows the other to enter.

This is why children have an extraordinary ability to fall in love.

When I searched my memory, with paleontological patience, for all the times I fell in love, I realized that for the most part it happened when I was a child. Deep down it was obvious; but I had never taken such an accurate census. I found and wrote more than a thousand crushes, even though I know that many escape me: it’s like trying to gather the sparks of a fire.

This force that burns and moves the world is our divinity, the primordial light. A perpetual source of sweetness, but not only that: love also has teeth, it suckles and devours. In its name – for another, for one’s family, for one’s land, for something of which one declares ownership, in general – blood and tears flow.

In the midst of such ferocity, a gaze open to the wonder and to the infinite beauty of nature is in itself a source of love and comfort. Happiness can be as small as a few centimetres, it can last the immeasurable time in which a memory lights up and takes us back to a good smell and the warmth of the sun coming through a kitchen window.

This is what we truly possess: the ability to pay attention, a heart that beats and can spark, and imagination.

“Mille innamoramenti” opens on Saturday 23 March at 5pm at the MLB Maria Livia Brunelli Gallery, in Ferrara.

It is inspired by the exhibition of Maurits Cornelis Escher at Palazzo dei Diamanti and it is curated by Maria Livia Brunelli.

“He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.”

M. C. Escher