It is an artistic / spiritual journey / experience that inside the Sanctuary of Lucia, welcomes all visitors and tourists, as well as pilgrims, as soon as they arrive in Venice, as it is located a few steps from the train station and Piazzale Roma.

The installation involves two works by the artist Gianni Turin, MisteriosaMente and Memento, polymaterial sculptures that invite reflection on the image of a faceless man, that the rector of the church, don Gianmatteo Caputo has chosen to push to reflect on the relationship between identity and person, face and spirit, or the recognition of the self.

The path then leads to approaching the relics of the saint, where a silver mask, commissioned by Pope John XXIII, does not hide the face but recalls the features of this young martyr lived about 1700 years ago taken from traditional iconography.

“The works chosen to dialogue with the Sanctuary of Lucia draw attention to the theme of sacrifice in the Christian sense, present in my work for over a decade but with echoes that also come to the works of the seventies / eighties. It therefore seemed significant to approach / dialogue / reflect on the martyr of Christ, Lucia. “(Gianni Turin)

An exhibition / experience, which, during the Carnival time, in which the mask is an opportunity to hide and to blend, leads to reflect on the sense of self and its image and identity, to think about what characterizes us, and before the relic of the saint urges us to confront ourselves on what remains of us “after us”.

Memento, 2012 – Polimaterico on a two-sided table (oil on wood, waxy stucco on wood, iron) 140x255x43 cm

Identities embedded like stones in the collective memory where, a crippled man, but at the same time a pillar of ideals, becomes a potentially lasting sign in time. Memento speaks of a man who, although subjected to the barbarism of the oppressor, placed on a hermon stands as an epigraphy, that is a potentially lasting sign: placed in the place that holds the urn of Lucia, the work recalls the earliest testimony of the cult of Lucia, a 4th century marble epigraph found in the catacombs of Syracuse. In the work mysterious shadows amplify the memory, while the divine glow that crosses it is a reminder of Lucia as a symbol of light.

MisteriosaMente, 2014 – Polimaterico (oil on canvas, iron) 26x146x21 cm

Mysteriously, it deals with the theme of the celebration of the mystery and the celebration of the human mind. In this case the mask-face lends itself to a double reading: a face in progress, an opening and a face in closing, masked, introspective. The work, in its place, seems to look at the image of the saint; the reference to the silver mask that covers the face of the martyr is immediate. Revisitation of neoclassical celebratory busts on trunks of Canovian derivation column, where light creates in the white and smooth surfaces of the soft shadows of strong spirituality, bringing us once again to the popular devotion that has always invoked Lucy to protect her eyesight by her name ( from lux, light), Lucia, symbol of light.

The exhibition is the Event Partner of the Venice Carnival 2019 and is included in the widespread exhibition of Gianni Turin Memoriale, curated by Sandro Gazzola, which involves, in addition to Lucia’s Sanctuary, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Pinacoteca and the Museum of the Island of the Armenians and Ca ‘Zenobio.

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