WEB_catalogo very regina

the construction of specially made sets for the occasion, the selection and research of accessories,
props and costumes from time to time appropriate to the individual shot, to finally arrive at the key
moment - the shooting moment, in fact - always realised alone, without the help of assistants, as in
a mysterious and prolonged sitting of self-analysis (or even self-hypnosis); then ending, afterwards,
and only afterwards, through complex and intricate post-production work on the image, through
detailed and sophisticated operations of juxtaposition of different images and pictorial-digital
work on the definitive work.
How much is there, then, of Vittoria Regina, the person, the deepest core of her identity, the
ghosts of her unconscious, in the impeccable, rigorous visions that Vittoria Regina, the artist and
performer, extracts from her dreams, to deliver them first on paper, in the form of notes, and then
to the camera in the form of images to be reconstructed meticulously, with the data, elements,
accessories (clothing, hairstyles, jewellery) of which reality provides? And what is there in the
person of Vittoria Regina and her unconscious in the looks, the expressions, the imperturbable
physiognomic geometry that Vittoria Regina the performer, the unique and unequivocal subject
of her pictures, is able to convey to the viewers of her final images? We could, as is often the task
of those curious compilers of similarities and cultural and iconographic references that are art
critics, weary ourselves with finding here a reference to Symbolist images, and thence to Ophelia
transported into an atmosphere of fashion, or further still into a pre-Raphaelite sensibility or, of
course, to the bizarre games of linguistic or visual Chinese boxes of which Salvador Dalí was
a tireless champion. The attempt, though dialectically and philologically correct, would tell us
nothing more of the stunning images of this artist who has, prematurely by her own admission,
stubbornly, almost by destiny, made herself into the privileged actress and single subject, obliged,
by her complex research, at once artistic and psychological, identity-based and formal. The secret
of the photographs of Vittoria Regina, like that of dreams, lies in their not being explained to
the end. Is it Ophelia or Vittoria who is being reflected to herself, beyond a stretch of imaginary
water, perhaps in a long, strange day in which it was her unconscious mind, and not her conscious
self, guiding the photographic lens of Vittoria, the artist? And from what distance comes the
face that emerges unexpectedly behind the baroque setting of an old mirror? What obscure and
unspeakable thoughts does the ominous and disturbing tangle of fabric covering bear within itself,
giving it almost the shape of a strange prehistoric animal, the performer at a time of dimming,
of oblivion: perhaps, who knows, of shame, of the rational self ? That distant memories confront
each other in the mind of the immortalised actress, we would almost say frozen in the act of
performing with her hands, without emotion or joy, one of those childhood pastimes that are
performed by pulling an elastic band in various ways between the fingers? And why is that lobster
stuck right in the middle of her spine? Why the pomegranate, so symbolically linked to the cult
of birth and death, and why has it lost its seeds on the model’s body? The answers, like the source
from which the images came, are placed in the deepest heart of the artist’s soul. And maybe also
a little in all of us.