Anteprima Madaudo

The St Peter’s fish bears two dark spots on its sides, one on each flank. According to legend, they are the fingerprints of Saint Peter, left when he drew the fish from the sea to find in its mouth the tribute coin. The mark remained. Ever since, that fish has carried with itself a story that predates it.

In Madaudo’s large panel, the John Dory emerges within a red line that outlines its profile with almost ritual precision. Inside, the matter thickens – threads, burn marks, fragments. The body preserves these traces, as though form could never separate itself from them.

This is a recurring feature in Madaudo’s works: the image is born through successive layers and reveals what has passed across the surface before settling. His painting seeks that point at which the figure becomes visible without breaking contact with matter.

Certain subjects return – horses, felines, fish, human figures – and each time their meaning shifts. They never become mere motifs. Within this persistence lies something that precedes iconographic interpretation, an intensity the image retains over time. It is what Warburg called Pathosformel: images capable of traversing meanings and exceeding them. In Madaudo’s painting, this tension does not rely on symbols to be deciphered but concentrates instead on the direct relationship between figuration and matter.

The two horses reveal this clearly. The same silhouette, opposing backgrounds – one ash grey, the other burnt red. The drawing itself does not change; what changes is the way matter supports and exposes it. In the first horse, the figure remains suspended; in the second, it thickens and acquires weight. In his animals recur restrained postures, compressed colours, gazes without eyes. They do not seek our gaze, nor return it. It is a way of being in the world that does not include us, and the painting leaves it intact.

With the figure of the Odalisque, the field opens further. The body reclines, full of colour; upon the skin emerge forms resembling fragments of landscape, memories that do not find their origin here. The dark head has neither features nor direction. It is the only point that withdraws, the only true distance within a figure that elsewhere gives itself fully. As though every work contained at least one zone, one margin, that resists approach.

Anteprima (“Preview”), the title of the exhibition at Art Studio La Marina, does not simply indicate what is to come. It names a condition: the image still suspended before settling into form, the moment when everything is still there – trace, tension, distance. It is there that Madaudo’s art finds its precision, in remaining within this time without closing it off. The figures appear both ancient and present at once. They do not refer to a past to be narrated; within the visible they preserve what precedes them.