Palazzo Merulana, in synergy with the Elena and Claudio Cerasi Foundation and CoopCulture, is pleased to host the "Lucciole" exhibition by Lucianella Cafagna, curated by Elena Del Drago, an unprecedented exhibition project that brings together 20 canvases of various formats, all produced in 2022 .

The exhibition, which is made up of about twenty works, has as its backdrop a certain thematic universe, that of Pier Paolo Pasolini's future omen: "I'd give the whole of Montedison for a firefly" he said a few months before he was killed.

The disappearance of those "groves of fire within the groves of bushes" appeared to him as the symbol of a cultural genocide by a new fascism that was more insidious than the previous one: neo-capitalism, with its artificial brilliance.

In this magma, nocturnal nymphs still move among the dazzling headlights of cars, large ships in the night, the foaming of motorcycles, iconic images of great cinema that pass from the lightness of light to that of brushstrokes imprinted on the canvas to express the urgency of survive the noise, the artificial brightness.

The space of the "Lucciole" is a horizon of possibilities yet to be discovered in what appears to be a dark time: Lucianella Cafagna, in her current full creative phase, resists and insists on the persistent values of her main weapon against cultural flattening: the pictorial production.

As the curator Elena Del Drago writes: "The Pasolini fireflies in the title, symbol of a lost authenticity in favor of a forced modernization, in Lucianella Cafagna's interpretation, also represent a reflection on the mechanisms of contemporary art, and therefore the possibility not to submit to the frenzy of the new, the spectacular, the "effect" that must be constantly renewed, at the turn of each season, biennial, fair. But the challenge is equally constituted by the need not to reiterate traditionalist paradigms, and therefore by keeping one's gaze firmly anchored on the contemporary".