Before the flight imposes itself as a held threshold, an image that does not tell of an event but delays it. The figure is frontal, exposed, crossed by the lines of the cage that do not merely contain it but scan its face, almost segmenting the very possibility of expression. We are not before a narrative imprisonment, but a condition that prolongs itself.
The wings, open behind the body, do not suggest impulse. They remain like an unused excess, a promise that finds no direction. The face, built through an insistent pictorial mask, does not seek empathy. It holds the gaze. In this charged immobility, the “before” evoked by the title ceases to be a moment and becomes a place.
It is here that the notion of restanza becomes more incisive than in previous works. It does not emerge as content to be recognised but as experience that deposits itself in the gaze. It is not a matter of remaining in wait for something, but of remaining within a condition that does not need to resolve. The cage is not only a limit, it is what allows this experience to happen.
The language that runs through the work too seems to function by contraction and slippage. Meaning does not offer itself in a linear way but thickens, interrupts, slides, as if it remained constantly on the threshold of its own formulation. More than declaring, it builds a held rhythm, a tension that does not dissolve and that continues to work beneath the surface of the image. In this way painting does not illustrate but exposes a thought in action, which forms and arrests itself in the same gesture.
The pictorial matter insists on this restraint. The surface does not open, does not concede depth. The colours of the wings and of the garment do not seek accord with the face, but set it in friction, as if two different regimes coexisted without finding synthesis. Everything concurs to keep active a tension that does not dissolve.
Before the flight thus marks a clear passage in the author’s research. Restanza no longer concerns only a situation or a relationship, but takes root as a condition. The flight loses importance, almost becomes secondary. What matters is this standing before, this remaining within a time that does not proceed. Not as a block, but as a form of experience that continues to produce meaning precisely because it does not let itself be accomplished.
Paola Martino