Margherita Manzelli (b. 1968)

The piercing gaze of the female figure of Margherita Manzelli's Il dominio trasformato - nessun amore does not let go of the viewer. Her eyes are the focus of the monumental canvas, drawing in all attention. She looks shy with her concave shoulders hunched forwards, while upset with her clutched fists. Her slightly bloodshot eyes are filled with worries, and her partially clothed body is more fragile, then it would have been if she had been entirely naked. This lone slumped figure hovers in the middle of the surface, caught as it were floating in space between the trembling, opaque paint layers in a plane of nothingness. Her feet stand on clearly distinguishable tiles, but become a blurred mass near the margins. Her haunting appearance, with her pale white skin, with the blue veins shimmering through the skin of her legs, the bones of her feet clearly visible and her protruding stare lock the audience in an intimate dialogue.
Manzelli's women resemble the physique of the artist, though she stresses that her work is not autobiographical: 'I know what I'm not trying to make, and that's a self-portrait (...) My subjects are invented and I would like them to be different to me. And yet I realise that this very desire is symptomatic of the fact that something of myself remains in them' (M. Manzelli quoted in: H. Kontova, 'Margherita Manzelli. Giving sense to the senseless,' in Flash Art International, January/February 2000, pp. 102-103). She paints from memory and her figures embody abstract concepts such as identity, the self, anxiety and loneliness. In the present lot, the composition, enhanced by the ominous title (The transformed domain - no love), leaves the onlooker with a discomfiting feeling of melancholy and morbidity, forced to turn the gaze inwards.