FEMINA / Riccardo Giovinetto

FEMINA is a real-time audiovisual installation that explores the idea of grace and the gaze that defines it.

Giovinetto's perspective on the ambiguous concept of beauty is based on the tradition of Italian Renaissance painting: female portraits by artists such as Leonardo, Botticelli and Piero della Francesca are deconstructed and digitally reworked in a unique interplay with the music of 16th century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. His pieces are completely reinterpreted, altered and overlaid with electronic sounds. The perspectives of the painters and the gaze of the faces depicted are also part of this process. They create a third, abstract point of view: a neutral, external eye that is trained to dissect the paintings into their primary elements – dots, lines, colours – and reassemble them to learn and independently recreate it its own way the ideals of beauty of the Italian Renaissance.