Ilaria Miotto, FIRST SKIN, 2023

First Skin gathers together paintings, material from the artist’s archives around the process of the emergence of affective elements at the origin of memory. Ilaria Miotto’s research, starting from the theme of memory seen as a psychic function of mental representation, explores the boundaries of the imaginary geographies of sensations that anticipate and underlie every structure of thought and language. The works follow one another as fragments, signs and relics to narrate the timeless conflict between matter and memory: the image appears to us on canvas thanks to a process of rewriting the ghosts that the author subtracts from the unconscious. In paintings the recursive procedure – the repetition of erasure and conservation – is thought of as a ritual practice within which the image becomes a residue of sacrifice.  The inseparability of the visual dimension from the tactile one transforms the painting into a constellation of traces and colors.  Ilaria Miotto stages the precariousness of existence through that magical space that is the image, first – and last – skin between the present and nothing.