Il corpo come luogo del divino

In this panel the body becomes the centre of the reflection. Francis appears marked by the stigmata, yet alongside this element so deeply bound to Christian tradition there appear tattoos, piercings and other signs belonging to the contemporary imagination.

The artist thus builds a dialogue between different eras, questioning the way in which every age inscribes upon the body its own identity, its own wounds and its own belongings.

Behind Francis appears a large host, which takes on the form of a halo. Behind it a pill can be glimpsed: two apparently distant images that evoke the care of the body and the care of the inner life. The work does not set them in opposition, but places them within one and the same enquiry into fragility and into the human desire for healing.

The entire composition unfolds within a geometric structure inspired by the work of Sol LeWitt, which recalls, in its balance and proportions, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. The body is not represented as mere biological reality, but as a measure of space, a place of relation between order, harmony and knowledge.

The cube on which Francis is seated also refers to LeWitt’s research, while the rod of Gino De Dominicis’s Calamita Cosmica rests against the figure’s foot, symbolically suggesting a point of contact between the human and the transcendent. It is from this encounter that the artist ideally makes the mark of the stigmata spring forth.

THEOPHANIA does not offer a reflection on the body as object, but as a place of manifestation. The body preserves the memory of the experiences, the sufferings, the transformations and the relationships that run through every person’s life.

Seen in this way, the stigmata too cease to be merely an extraordinary event in Francis’s biography. They become the symbol of an existence in which the relationship with the divine is made visible through the concreteness of a life actually lived.

The work thus invites us to look at the body not as the limit of the spiritual dimension, but as the place in which the person takes form in his or her entirety, uniting matter, consciousness and openness to the transcendent.