The exhibition was dedicated to oils, drawings, etchings by Giulia Napoleone from 1999 to 2002; the result is rich in themes and suggestions. On display were twenty oil paintings, five large format ink on paper drawings (35×123 cm), twenty-eight drawings (also ink on paper) and six mezzotints.
The title of the show, Mutano i cieli (The Skies are Changing), comes from a verse in Horace’s Epistolae, Caelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt, and underlines how changing techniques imply a drastic change in expressive forms. In this nucleus of oil paintings, shown to the public for the first time, Prussian blues, cobalts, azures and sky-blues have surpassed the aqueous dimensions of her immense water-colours, where lines, traces and surfaces are tensed in a vibration which is exalted by the absence of matter. In these paintings, the use of canvas and oils, which the artist masters with verve, using its body to the full, constitute a surface where the constant overlaying of a rigorous and controlled pictorial gesture composes rhythmic and vibrant scansions. True lines of tension which in her latest works have taken the form of strings, modifying the way that light is refracted. In the passage from the watercolour to oils, the artist’s painting has gained a sculptural, bas-relief dimension, where the refraction of light is the protagonist in works which are apparently monochrome. But the soul of Giulia Napoleone has not changed. Her artistic quest is still that of grasping and recovering an emotion – that of a perception of the light, which still moves and perturbs our senses when we are before the vision.