Irlanda Zantone was born in Venice, 1975 and now divides her time between Milan and Venice. Moving from painting to fashion and back again, she has studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, Istituto Marangoni, Milano and NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano). She has had a number of solo and group exhibitions in Italy and has started showing in London, most recently at WW Gallery.
PG: Parental Guidance (05/03/09 - 05/04/09) In Intimo we are again confronted with the body of a woman and the mind of a child. A model poses expressionless against a backdrop of 'bad wallpaper', her translucent lingerie marks the death of innocence, while the expanse of over-painted, flat flesh refers to Manet's Olympia and the objectification of the female sex. In Sesso the irises twinkle and the lips glow behind a black mask surrounded by repetitive graphite scrawls "Sexy, sex, sex, sex, sex...lips...sex everywhere". Also peeping through the wash are blurred snatches of text that read 'beauty' and 'the creative mind'. Both works are about the damage wrought by low self-esteem and low self-worth, which can arise from early sexualisation. In both pieces the girls' inner beauty is contained, concealed and unexpressed.
Mink Schmink (17/01/09 - 15/02/09) Zantone uses glossy magazine images from publications such as Vogue and Vanity fair to create her painterly collages and portraits. While she usually creates mask-like portraits with flesh tones, in Vanita' (a portrait of Marilyn Monroe) she has used gold. There was an advert circulating recently from the World Gold Council featuring a gold bar inscribed with the words ‘Only Gold Is Divine'. Irlanda Zantone features this same advert (cut from Italian Vogue: Solo l'Oro e' Divino) in her transcription of Hieronymus Bosch's The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, 1485. Gold has symbolically been associated with extremes of evil and purity. With it she passes comment on the greed that has led to the current economic gloom.
I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night (19/09/08 - 06/11/08) Cose Nascoste#01, 02, 03 The images are unsettling for the viewer and recall for the artist her own dreams and nightmares in which "...faces that I encounter, engage with...they are always vague or out of focus or composed only of dead eyes and mouth, like a mask, but a mask that is part of the skin..."
She cites Ensor and Munch as influences for the mask-like faces and heavy atmospheres. The compositional similarity between Cose Nascoste #01 and Munch's 1895 Madonna is striking, although, claims Zantone, totally subliminal "I only recognised the Madonna after I finished painting, I hadn't noticed it at all during the process, but at an unconscious level, I must have known it!" Her starting point for the Cose Nascoste(Hidden Things) series was Vogue magazine and the endless, impossible pictures of beauty and retouched perfection that confront us everyday. But the glossy surfaces of these images are messed up and mattified, seemingly stiffened under too much makeup and powder; the painted ladies are painted out. Their skin puckers, wrinkles and ages under the washes of paint and ink, belying the surface of the paper, the mass-production, the mass-marketing and the fakery of fashion and beauty imagery.
It may seem obvious to suggest a reference to Venice and the Carnivale; growing up in a city full of masks at every turn must play a part, but so too do the hundreds of churches with their images of the Madonna, the stiffness of Byzantine iconography and Venice's literary links to death, beauty and water. Zantone concedes "Maybe it's a bit, um, cheesy (?) to say this, but perhaps the faces are Venice, as she is decaying/restoring/drowning; perhaps the faces are islands in inky lagoons"
Text by Chiara Williams from a conversation with Irlanda Zantone in August 2008.
