Starting in 2008 and for 12 years, Juan Francisco Casas carried out research on the baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, culminating in the exhibition ‘Non piangere’, which was to be inaugurated in April 2020, but was postponed because of the pandemic. Thus, the last pieces of the project, made in confinement from photographs taken of themselves by the sitters, were based on Artemisia Gentileschi’s Maddalenas. This biblical figure continues to have a complex appeal: sinful, repentant, in love, demoniac, independent… In her iconography we can see the powerful eroticism of a free woman who gives her love unconditionally, and that of the strong woman who shows herself to be on an equal footing with men, leaving her own written gospel which, like so many artistic works made by women, remained on the margins of history.
The project (NOLI) ME TANGERE, begun in 2019 and completed in 2025, situates professional women in the art world in the powerful iconography of the Maddalena, establishing a metaphor for the role of that sex in this profession. Introspection and reflection, the sacred and the sensual, all articulated in an exhibition starring this Mary Magdalene who was never a protagonist, practically erased from history and who, precisely for this reason, is a transcript, in her complexity and multiplicity, of every woman.
Juan Francisco Casas – “MaddalenaMedusaJessi / Iftheycameinthemorning (after Angela Davis) 1 & 2”
