Beatrice Alici

In Silent Lake, the work competing for the Cairo Prize, Beatrice Alici exploits the typical elements of her imagination to continue her exploration of the unconscious: a deep excavation that intertwines echoes of naïve symbolism and references to the surreal. The result is a form of magical realism imbued with fantasy and fairy-tale suggestions, but at the same time anchored to a subplot of theoretical references (primarily the studies of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas on the archaic cult of the Great Goddess). At the centre of the painting, a diaphanous female figure stands out against the backdrop of a forest, reflected on the surface of a lake: she could be a deity, as well as the trace of a dream or an ancestral memory. The cold tones and nocturnal setting – typical of her painting – give substance to an introspective experience, in which darkness becomes a passageway, an opening. The vegetal element amplifies the visionary dimension, while the aquatic element refers to deep emotion and fertility, and the points of light suggest immaterial presences, charged with mystery and attractive force. The brushwork does not seek hyper-realistic detail, but rather reproduces the aura of an epiphany. The work thus becomes itself a place of revelation: an invitation to silently contemplate the archive of signs and symbols inscribed in nature and reproduced on the canvas.

Sara Boggio