I am delighted to announce my solo exhibition 'Echo' at Monti8, Rome.
'Echo' follows a deep interest of mine in how sensations within human experience reverberate across time and space, like a sound echoing through a chamber or a movement dispersing across water. My practice is driven by abstract yet deeply embodied states. The movement of our bodies into states of awe, mystery, wonder, and connection is what I believe makes us human.
This exhibition reaches from within the human body to the planes of colour found within the butterfly wing, often regarded as a symbol of spirit externalising itself. Macro imagery of arteries and heart valves expands outward into worlds in themselves. Through these works, I am focused on the sensation of the body as a lens through which we encounter the world—the body understood as an energetic system that is also a world in its own right.
I am interested in how the act of looking through the body can open onto unknown, elemental, or sky-like spaces. The internal patterns of the body and the veining of the butterfly are seen as reflections of one another, suggesting an underlying correspondence between inner and outer worlds, and revealing our interconnection with what lies beyond the self.
Through this work, I continue to explore how present experience might generate echoes that extend beyond the immediate moment—reaching into both the past and the future. In doing so, I consider how we might connect to a wider lineage of sensation that situates human experience within a continuous, shared field of perception.
"In this process, painting abandons its descriptive and mimetic quality,
transforming into a visual labyrinth, as much for the mind as for the eye. Here the visionary
value of her research emerges and as theorized by Wassily Kandinsky, form - even when
entirely abstract and geometric - possesses an inner sound. For this reason, in the works
on display, seeing is transformed into listening, so that each painting merges with the
others, composing the echoes of a single, overarching sonority. This synesthetic
relationship between color and sound, beyond generating a visual tremor, produces an
auditory vibration that allows us to consider Imogen Allen in relation to those who have
made tone and chromatic variation a privileged means of expressing a particular emotional
state. Alongside the aforementioned Wassily Kandinsky, one may also recall the work of
Paul Klee, František Kupka, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay - painters who demonstrated
a spiritual approach to art, understood as the capacity to recognize within the real
dimension a component capable of opening up infinite cognitive experiences. Thus, while
not resorting to hermetic symbolic manipulations or hidden codes, the artist constructs a
language that is both sensitive and profoundly phenomenological."
Maria Vittoria Pinnoti, exerpt from exhibition essay 'If Painting Becomes Sound'
Please contact info@monti8.com for all enquires.