Without a trace of sorrow or regret

I write choking on paint, saturated with real bodies made flesh with pigments and binders.

I write after digesting brushstrokes full of rage, contemplating rigid fades, observing with pleasure claw-hands that pull hair and ropes, enjoying the expressions on the faces of rotund women who decided to literally take charge of their lives.

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It's Peter Orner's fault

A right arm rests on a belly and the curve it builds is in direct dialogue with a snake placed on a white sheet.

In

by Artemisia Gentileschi the woman's body is rigid, white death, she does not give herself to anyone so that no one can dispose of it as she pleases.

Cleopatra's body is Cleopatra's.

She stretches diagonally across the width of the frame and forcefully catches the snake's body.

She crushes him.

The show, which can be seen until March 19 at the Gallerie d'Italia in Naples, is of impeccable excellence.

The red velvet walls present the canvases as a whole, with their findings and their mistakes, with their fears and their triumphs.

Gentileschi's paintings put us on alert, those that don't appease the anger of the author's brushstrokes but feed that of those who observe.

We discover the works of Massimo Stanzione or Hendrick de Somer with a

in which it seems that the lives of women make sense only if they turn to that of the leading man.

“Highly sexual”, “The old and the young”, I note in my notebook.

The old man has his gaze lost in infinity, and kindness seems to overflow from his eyes, allowing himself to become a clear example of the normalization of relationships between mature men and young women.

Giovanni Francesco di Rosa revisits the well-worn myth of

, who, once again, are tender and familiar.

Susana seems to want to send the old people away, but she can't, because doing so would be rude.

She knows that her body belongs to them.

Knowing the intentions of the old, that supposed goodness terrifies us: it is in the family nucleus where most sexual abuse is carried out.

Galatea's Triumph is Artemisia's Triumph.

She appears before us as a determined Purisima.

Surely, if she had seen that woman as a child instead of the languid woman that Murillo painted, she would have had a role model.

It is fair that

is the piece with which she closes the show.

Galatea looks up.

The light bathes her face and the rest of her body, which rises above the penumbra in which the rest of the figures live.

In her beauty and whiteness I recognize my mother's body and anticipate what will be mine.

I remember my mother when she was young.

Every time she pointed out the stretch marks on her belly, she told me "This is you."

She did it shamelessly.

She hugged her body.

Without a trace of sorrow or regret.

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