“A continuous narration that proceeds by snapshots, a story made of still images (or, as we say today, of “screenshots”) that are assembled in a complex puzzle, varied and constantly evolving: this is the feminine universe of Evita Andújar, the undisputed protagonist of the poetics of the Andalusian artist, who always works in the balance – but with skillful mastery of intention and gesture – on the ridge that runs between figuration and abstraction.

The exhibition entitled ‘Verdad muda’ collects a series of paintings from the cycle ‘Stolen Selfie’, inspired by the paradox of our hyper-technological society, overexposed to a continuous flow of images and information that, however, often lack real content. The identities that social networks obsessively send back to us are only pale simulacra of a reality that few, by now, bother to penetrate and know: so Andújar distorts and erases these surface individualities with the declared aim of provoking an alternative reflection, of shifting the focus from appearance to substance.

Evita’s women, as she herself has often explained, are at the same time her alter-ego and archetypes of contemporary femininity, enclosing in themselves on the one hand the reflection of the artist’s multiple nuances, and on the other hand paradigmatic images of today’s woman, immersed in a complex, restless, buzzing reality, which forces her to be – to paraphrase Pirandello – “one, none and a hundred thousand”, in a perpetual dialectic with the mutability of human relationships and the fleeting nature of existence.

This sense of elusiveness and temporariness, from which none of us is immune, is translated on Evita’s canvases, evidently transfiguring the protagonist, she, the woman: although undeniably the center of the scene, as happens in the tradition of the portrait, the female figure loses its identity, which often liquefies in the domination of the pictorial matter on the image (as in ‘Stolen Selfie 69 or Brezza’), sometimes she deliberately hides or subtracts herself (for example, in ‘Stolen Selfie 45 or Hide what you are not’), other times, finally, she doubles in partial reflections of herself that never give back a definite identikit (‘Stolen Selfie 56 or In the white of tomorrow’).

And yet, in the artist’s canvases there is always an element of hope, a tension between physical space, time and emotions, a spark that leads us to question ourselves on the “what” and the “why”: the accuracy of the rendering of certain details in the setting (representing mostly bourgeois domestic environments), the never casual use of light and color (the intense blues, the bright reds, the flashing whites), the poses or gestures of the figures that never appear passively static but rather traversed by a composed and controlled subterranean restlessness, suggest to us a story that has yet to be written, an “other” key to interpretation that emerges through the different interpretive levels of the work, a verdad muda that presses inexorably for a voice. ”

Raffaella Salato