by Dores Sacquegna
Maria Luisa Imperiali’s works conjure, in an atmosphere charged with symbols, the image of a supreme body—open to interaction, embedded in a magical and secret scenario. It is a body transfigured by the artist, sheltered by mysterious forms: archetypal sculptural presences or familiar elements from daily life.
Imperiali’s utopia does not aim to rupture the past; rather, it seeks to rediscover humanity’s poetic and mythical dimension, to reweave the bonds with our origins. The Pink Room becomes a sacred space—metaphorically tied to the structure of the universe, at once earthbound and celestial. It reflects on the transformations of humankind, proposing a cosmogony in which consciousness serves as the conduit for an ideal transfiguration of the world, starting from its anthropological roots. Here, nature becomes humanized, and the human, naturalized—until the two merge into an idealized humanity.
The artist is fully aware of her dual identity: Western and Eastern, traditional and contemporary. To her, culture—any culture—is something to be consumed. Her favored subject remains her own body, reframed through the visual lexicon of art history; her creative mission, however, lies in forging constant links between dream and reality, generating fantastical, hybrid figures.
In the Pink Moon series, the artist embodies a mother and her two children, transfigured in a theophanic light that becomes both space and silence, as well as ritual. Within its temple, echoing Calvino’s words, “the jester’s skipping step” can be heard—that is, the one who penetrates the air within things without breaking them.
The faces of her figures are glorified by a lunar halo, while their limbs seem to vibrate with atomic particles—symbols of transformation between inner and outer being, fullness and void, the indivisible and the mutable.
In this rose-tinted galaxy, serpents/spermatozoa represent rebirth from illness and death, endowed with the mythic ability to descend underground and rise again, to shed their skin. Man lives within a universe of symbols—and he is, himself, a symbol: a microcosm within a macrocosm.
In this desecrated humanity, birth is celebrated as the paradigm of an ongoing quest for truth—truth as revelation, as the unveiling of meaning, predating both divine and human laws, beyond the boundary of life and death, past, present and future.
Within the Pink Room, the artist plays with her characters as though they were alter egos, gathering difference as a living, concrete expression of a will to change. I think of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, as I observe the Pink Room—a space arranged as a kind of dollhouse parody, where scattered objects coexist: the “Pink Skin” (a kind of giant drill), the Big Mama (a voluminous matryoshka doll that encases everyday items within her material body), and the small child in a pink suit lying on the floor, pensively watching the family unfold.
An imaginary world, perhaps—or a dream-box through which one might navigate without compass, and fly without a parachute. A place where various shades of pink suggest different sensations, where unheard atmospheres take shape: a fil rouge between the desire to end the story and the temptation to seal it within yet another “pink box.”
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Maria Luisa Imperiali Works & Words 