11Feb/31Mar
MUTANT FAMILIES
GILDA MAUTONE
In Gilda Mautone's painting, the family unit becomes the stage for a performance that can no longer conceal its own cracks. Set against backgrounds of bourgeois wallpaper — floral patterns, nineteenth-century motifs, ornamental medallions — the figures adopt the poses of family photography, yet their faces bear red markings that hover between theatrical make-up, wound, and mask. The title "And the Oscar goes to" makes the register explicit: family as a performance staged for the outside world, an enacted unity rather than a lived one. Overlapping bodies, suspended silhouettes, figures floating in blue water or framed within dark armchairs heighten a sense of instability beneath the composed surface. What emerges is an iconography of the family as a fragile, theatrical construction, where an orderly appearance barely contains a disquiet surfacing directly from the faces themselves
