Valentina
Lucarini Orejón

Valentina Lucarini Orejon is an Italo-Spanish artist living and working in Pietrasanta. She grew up inside a historic art foundry, the Fonderia Versiliese, where she received a sensory alphabet before a technical one: the hiss of the furnaces, the smell of melting wax, the colour of molten bronze, the heat of the crucible, the taut silence of the minutes before the pour, and the shelves crowded with hands, feet, heads and casts awaiting their fusion. That environment was already a Wunderkammer before she knew what one was, the matrix of her imagination, the place where she absorbed, by sensory rather than intellectual means, the plastic grammar of Mediterranean devotion. She has since subverted the hierarchy of that sculptural process, turning it into a language.

Her research revolves around the body, fragmented or evoked, and around the contemporary ex-voto: the relic freed from its religious meaning and understood as the reconstruction of a presence that has become absence. She works lost-wax bronze and the metal residues of the casting process as autonomous languages, charged with symbolic and alchemical value, matter transfigured and ritualised. On the wax model, before casting, she engraves with the engraver's points other miniature ex-votos, sacred hearts, eyes, hands: signs that the bronze preserves once the wax has vanished in the fire, so that each work becomes a palimpsest, a stratification of meanings in which the votive contains further votive.

Her sculptures inhabit the threshold between cult and relic: an inherited iconography, shared by the two cultures that formed her, the Italian and the Spanish, in which Mediterranean devotion gave body to entreaty and to memory. In a time that has lost its ritual forms, they do not reconstruct ritual but preserve its trace, relics of a ritual world of which we have become orphans.