Event detail
In Sista Pratesi's new body of work we are presented with a fictional society of women. Inspired by Aldous Huxley's novel "Island", Pratesi has created her own community set in a timeless world. In his novel, Huxley invented an enlightened Utopian society and proposed that the key to solving the world s problems lies in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. Pratesi's paintings portray her own imagined society, isolated from the known world. The female inhabitants have attained a form of enlightenment beyond anything achieved in our world.
Calm and powerful women are depicted in various poses. The economical use of colour gives these women uniformity, although each is distinct, connected by the abstract thoughtscapes through which they achieve a unified consciousness. In this hidden world, conventional landscapes have been replaced by internal thoughtscapes. Significantly, Pratesi has chosen not to paint the eyes of her subjects, replacing them with dark almond shapes. Eyes, so often thought to be the window to the soul, the focus of interaction between people, are presented as dark voids. This is not to suggest that these women are empty, but rather their anonymity and our inability to read them puts them at a distance from us and prompts our own desire to get closer to them. These women are defined by their thoughts and their collective freedom to just be.
