Exhibitions: "The Catalogue of Huts" at the Banco Napoli Foundation

The technique is that of writing with light engraved on sheets of plexiglass or glass (negative to create a positive), which, when illuminated, reveal something else. The message: "Go beyond the surface." On Tuesday, September 16th, at 6 pm, at the Fondazione Banco Napoli (Via dei Tribunali, 213), Monica Biancardi's exhibition "The Catalogue of Huts" opens. It features photographs, drawings, and objects that speak to domestic violence and hidden suffering. This important artistic and socially critiqued project began during the lockdown and continues today. The exhibition runs until October 15th. A mapping of the political world on tracing paper, to make it more truthful, of a horrific chronicle, which the artist annotates with red marker and pencil, matching certain dates with the names of those states where the most cases of violence were reported during the pandemic year of 2020. At that time, Monica, like all artists, set to work and did nothing but collect data. Thanks to her work as a teacher, she discovers that there are many requests from students, who want to talk after class. From there, a world opens up: in every home, or rather "hut" as it is called, not everyone is safe, the worst things, horrors and mistakes, happen. "We need to shed light," explains Biancardi. "Mine is an invitation not to stop at the surface, but to go beyond, learning to read and reflect above and within the shadows. ' The Catalogue of Huts' is a study of photography in its early stages , but also a sharp cry of protest, a blow that stirs the conscience, an invitation to go beyond, in a profound reflection that does not want and should not be exclusively feminine." The exhibition represents a continuation of Monica's artistic research, inspired by photography and plexiglass sheets, on which she has engraved everyday objects represented as double-edged swords that attack the feminine sphere. Each piece on display is unique, has its own story, and is born from the fusion of photography and engraving.

"The sign engraved on plexiglass, the paper, and the photograph," explains art historian Olga Scotto di Vettimo , "combine to give the work, along with the wrought-iron frames and museum-quality glass, a new complexity. Biancardi thus uses drawing as a preliminary study, to then produce writings of light, made of images and shadows, employing a vocabulary as ancient as it is complex to give photography, still and in this present, new possibilities and poetic epiphanies." Shadows and signs of light on plexiglass are also used by Biancardi to reflect, through the five senses, on the dangers posed by seemingly innocuous everyday products linked to the clichés of the feminine world: Touch and the deceptive frivolity of the feathered fan; Sight and the bottle of eye drops containing glue; Smell and the perfume atomizer; Taste and the lip-stitching set; Hearing and the earrings that double as earplugs. Even the necklace/noose does not escape this logic. Nothing is as it seems. Light must be shed. Among the numerous cases of violence against women recorded in art history, Monica Biancardi chooses to capture three, capturing the faces of the painter Artemisia Gentileschi , raped in 1611 by Agostino Tassi; Costanza Bonarelli, lover and model of Gian Lorenzo Bernini , who, out of jealousy, had her face slashed with a razor in 1638; and the poet Faustina Maratti, victim of an attempted kidnapping by the young Giangiorgio Sforza Cesarini in 1703. Biancardi, a Neapolitan artist born in 1972, graduated in scenography with an experimental thesis on theater photography. She began working for important directors (while also teaching), while also carrying out personal research that later resulted in exhibitions, including writing with light. This year, his project "Growing Capital" is among the winners of the PAC – Plan for Contemporary Art 2025 , promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. MAN has acquired an extraordinary collection of eleven black-and-white photographs, taken between 2009 and 2023, which rigorously and delicately document the growth of Bedouin twins Sara and Sarah, whom the artist met during a trip to Palestine.