From 6 to 27 October 2019, the MA * GA Museum in Gallarate hosts the personal exhibition of Elisa Anfuso (Catania, 1982), entitled "Eyes Wide Shut".

The exhibition, curated by Angelo Crespi, with the support of the liquid art system, presents a dozen works by the Sicilian artist, which are characterized by an atmosphere suspended halfway between reality and fiction, within which they move exclusively women and adolescents.

The cold protagonists of his canvases are captured in sophisticated poses for effect, sometimes hieratic, often theatrical, on a backdrop that reveals a firm and indifferent nature, or on white spatial scores or on barely hinted at sixteenth-century architecture.

Elisa Anfuso pays particular attention to every aspect of her paintings, from the clothes, simple but at the same time heavy with lace, to the elaborate hairstyles to the point of exhaustion, from the animals, to the objects, to the sweets, which seem to have come out of the pages of a constantly evolving fairy tale.

Moreover, as Angelo Crespi affirms, "the adolescents and women of Anfuso maintain a certain erotic charge, their postures reveal certain infantile disturbances, but in the cold composure of the forms and in the cleanliness of the line, nothing overflows and the sensations are channeled , brought back into the bed of a near-normality ".

The title of the exhibition, "Eyes Wide Shut" takes up that of Stanley Kubrick 's film of the same name (1999) based in turn from the novel Double Dream by Arthur Schnitzler (1925/26) and reflects precisely the ambiguity of a look at a time open and closed, simultaneously facing outwards and inwards. It is no coincidence that some of the women portrayed appear blindfolded, blind to the outside world, but careful to look within themselves.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog of MA * GA / liquid art system editions.