INTRO-SPECTIO - Annalaura di Luggo

[...] In Intro-Spectio, we also find three-quarter length portraits with gazes turned opposite the direction of the head, as can be seen in Sofonisba Anguissola’s self-portrait or in Elisabetta Sirani’s depiction of herself as she paints a portrait of her father. This technique gives the observer the impression of being followed by the subject’s gaze—a sensation the visually impaired

are precluded from, whether they be the subject depicted or the individuals facing the work. Annalaura di Luggo created two versions of Intro-Spectio (Staglieno), from 2022. In the first, she inserted a blue iris on a grayscale print of a Symbolist sculpture by Onorato Toso, part of a funerary monument in the cemetery of Staglieno. The frame only partially captures the female angel who covers her eyes with her hand. In the second version, the same frame features the whiteness of an image struck by a blinding flash of light. In both versions, the iris is on the angel’s chest and the relief lines captured by the light suggest a rotational movement. The cut of the image makes the angel’s gesture appear ambiguous, whereas for Toso, who sculpted her lying atop a tomb, it is one of desperation. To make ambiguous the meaning of an image borrowed from the history of art, without removing it from its original context, is the strategy that allows di Luggo to showcase how human beings can find resources to make their lives rich in light. [...]

Demetrio Paparoni

[...] By uniting “scientific and social research, photographic recordings and performative interaction,”2 the artist has spent years undertaking an investigation that embraces the history of the eye "je voudrais une Histoire des Regards" was what Roland Barthes strongly desired in the first pages of his chambre claire—giving rise to works that both imbibe certain places and names from the history of art (one need only think of her sizeable series INTRO-SPECTIO from 2022-2024, which features images from Greco-Roman statuary, Bernini, Germaine Richier, Hélène Bertaux and Adèle d’Affry), while also embracing multimedia installations in which gazes become a seductive mirror upon which bodies move, as well as images of a performative firmament shaped by aggregation, adhesion and didactic dynamisms. [...]

Antonello Tolve

[...] These are landscapes, architectures, or masterpieces from both the past and present, waiting to be revealed beyond the darkened layer that hides them. [...] Those holes in the surface [...] are the belly of the gaze or a cave of the heart, a womb of light: here nestle the irises of humans and animals, photographed by Annalaura di Luggo with a camera she herself patented. The work thus forms one or more layers, creating a creative platform that develops across different terrains while maintaining perfect dialectical consistency. Whether photographic prints, plexiglass, or Dibond, these pieces are organized in parallel planes, alignments, or asymmetries that change depending on the viewer’s perspective, constantly renewing countless scenic situations. The 20th-century tradition of spatialism interacts with the latest media practices, bringing to life a here and a beyond that is neither an evasive answer nor a finished discourse, but a true mirror of the human condition, which has no meaning except through its own existence, perception, and vision. [...]

Marcello Palminteri