Conceived as altarpieces for the baroque church of San Giuseppe delle Scalze a Pontecorvo in Naples, the birthplace of Isabella Ducrot, the three larger-than-life works on paper featured in the artist’s exhibition “The Miracoloso(The Miraculous) sat somewhat awkwardly on the walls of a white cube dwarfed by their towering scale, their lower edges curving to rest on the gallery’s polished concrete floor. And yet, the tension resulting from their sacred subject matter now being shown in a secular space has been productive. The triptych, whose presentation at T293 reproduces that of the Scalze, juxtaposes three miraculous episodes taken from the New Testament: the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi and the Descent of the Holy Spirit.
With their contrasting flat planes of brightly colored and patterned Japanese paper glued to a fortified paper backing, these works – the Annunciation and Adoration in particular – evoke Nabi paintings. The barely sketched faces and hands in these blots left blank have an alluring tenderness and childlike sweetness. Silhouetted against a starry night sky framed by a Gothic arch, the sinuous figures of Annunciation“The stuffa a quadri(The Checkered Cloth). In “The Miracoloso», the artist reinterprets the humble checkered pattern of the fabric that lines the mantle of the angel in the Annunciation by Martini and Memmi and appropriates it: the pattern appears in his rendering of the amorphous space which separates the angel Gabriel of Mary, reappears in the cape sported by one of the adoring Magi, and decorates the decoration of the dancing figures in the six medium-sized works of the “Disk» cycle, 2023. These last works, which are variants on the theme of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, were produced especially for this exhibition and take up in multiples the theme of the last part of the main triptych.
The Descent of the Holy Spirit is undoubtedly less familiar than the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi, which are among the most recognizable and often depicted biblical stories. As told in Acts, the Holy Spirit bequeathed to the Apostles and other followers of Christ the gift of speaking in tongues in Jerusalem during the Feast of Weeks, Shavuot, a Jewish harvest festival; the pagan equivalent of this celebration is Pentecost, so named because it occurs fifty days after Easter. The staging of the work on this festive occasion may explain Ducrot’s depiction of the faithful dancing with outstretched arms in a gesture of thanksgiving in his highly original take on the New Testament narrative.
As the flames in the vast Discesa dello spirito santo (Descent of the Holy Spirit), 2021, are reminiscent of burning candles, torches or even matches, those emanating from the Holy Spirit in the six smaller accompanying pieces suggest, if at all, falling petals – reminiscent of the rose petals which to this day can be seen raining down on congregations gathered in churches on the morning of Pentecost, symbolizing the “tongues of fire” which endowed the apostles with the uncanny ability to speak to each in their own language and marked the beginning of the Christian church in the Bible narrative. These six framed works, arranged in two rows mounted on a freestanding exhibition panel facing the triptych, are marked by a process of increasing abstraction: the Holy Spirit himself, the hero of this particular story, is present in a futuristic white shape, more like an airplane than a dove.
