On “Sinapsi Game”

By Mimma Pasqua

…I admired her courage in reaching the core of things, shaking off the comforting encrustations of culture with which we attempt to make the inexplicable more palatable—by framing it within logical categories—when in truth it strikes you in the gut like a well-placed punch from a boxer who’s broken through the opponent’s guard. It is no coincidence that the heart—with all the symbolic meanings we have burdened it with—appears so frequently in the artist’s work.

Through an expressive language that flows from Dadaism and Surrealism to Pop Art—borrowing from the latter the standardized forms of mass-produced objects, stripped of affect so as to become vessels for profound emotion—and arriving at the shores of Art Brut, I retraced with the artist a current that ultimately leads, albeit through different forms, to Munch’s scream: the experience of pain rooted in the deepest recesses.
“Sinapsi Game” is a game that gives wings to the feet and roller skates to the cat and dog, while the head floats away and a child has lost their heart. A journey in search of the lost heart, with much tenderness and a touch of cruelty—or perhaps the other way around. A white-clad little girl dangerously unwraps candies with a sharp knife, and suddenly finds herself at a school desk—“squola”—while her mother is a puzzle made of legs, arms, head, and hands, drifting in space, to be gently reassembled. Careful—you might hurt her.
“Sinapsi Game”: one image draws the next, and together they form a story—mine and yours. What’s in your little cardboard suitcase? Have you packed all your little things neatly? A tiny head with pelvic bones, a sleeping fetus rocking on the moon’s tide, and a tender little skull to roll over the grass of the playing field, where the white-clad mother protects and watches over…

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