Galleria Fumagalli presents Letizia Cariello solo exhibition “Seven Gates” curated by Giorgio Verzotti. Invited to conceive a project for Annamaria Maggi’s gallery space, the artist realizes a site-specific installation – never seen before – in the main room of the gallery. In this wide closed space, Letizia Cariello draws seven different windows from the Gothic double-arched to the “Modernist” basic rectangular. Drawn freehand by the artist on sheets of tracing paper, the seven windows are then transposed to the walls by hammering nails along the outlines of their shapes. Letizia Cariello interweaves red wool threads (her distinctive sign) among the nails functioning as hooks to form a coloured mesh.

The gallery’s space is now studded with openings that still remain virtual. The only physical element is the interwoven red thread that draws a closure, or that might declare a double will: the desire to reach an intimate retreat, which is also the potential state for an opening to the outside, to otherness. The window stands for it: an architecture that encloses but necessary looks outside, as in a continuous flow of connections. A border is traced to be crossed: Letizia Cariello says that a grid is not always the metonymy of a prison, and she quotes Santa Caterina da Siena: «Make yourself a mind-room, where only you can go». «A protected place from where to observe», says the artist, prepared to be also observed.

Born in Copparo (province of Ferrara), Letizia Cariello lives and works in Milan, where she currently teaches Anatomical Drawing at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Her research explores through different practices and media (drawing, installation, photography, sculpture, video…), the relationship between inner and outer space. Her attempt to capture the consistency of time focuses on the chase of the traces left by its flow by writing them (the calendars) on objects and matters. Aim of this process is a continuous performance to re-construct connections, relations and bonds (the red thread) through the identification and the real seam of objects and spaces, both in macro and micro dimensions: from trees to teapots, from small cups to embroidered photographs.