Mirrors of the Female Soul at the Fidanda Art Gallery

In the context of the 40th edition of Effetto Venezia, whose guiding theme is “Creative – What Women Tell Us”, the exhibition “Mirrors of the Female Soul” is configured as an essential stage of the cultural journey proposed by the festival. The exhibition project collects and amplifies contemporary artistic voices that, through different languages, act as interpreters of the complexity of female identity.

The exhibition stems from a precise curatorial urgency: to portray the female universe not as a unique or symbolic category, but as a plurality of experiences, gestures, visions, and depths. The goal is to reflect – in the truest sense of the term – on what the figure of woman represents today in the collective consciousness and artistic sensibility.

The title “Mirrors of the Female Soul” is not just a metaphor, but a curatorial reading key: each work presents itself as a reflective surface capable of revealing what often remains invisible – deep emotions, silent tensions, submerged stories, wounds, and desires. Art, in this context, becomes a place of listening and resonance, a space where the female image is not shown as an aesthetic object, but as a thinking subject, a narrating body, a living presence.

Through painting, digital photography, paper, string art, and mixed techniques, the selected artists offer a contemporary reading of femininity as a multifaceted gaze on the world. The exhibited works portray women as interiority, visual strength, social presence, mental and material texture.

The exhibition fully embraces the spirit of Effetto Venezia 2025, which this year dedicates its investigation to female creativity as a daily and radical gesture of transformation. Not a celebratory tribute, but a lucid and profound exploration, capable of bringing out – through art – what women tell us when they find a space to be seen, heard, and thought.

The exhibition aims to be a visual exploration of the plurality of the female voice, its expressive forms, its capacity for reflection, construction, and resistance.

Each artist involved interprets a different aspect of being a woman: as an inner mirror, as visual strength, as social commitment, as mental and material structure.

Artists and Works: Reflecting between Image and Theme

Cristian Andreini

Livorno, 1999

Andreini explores the relationship between spirituality, myth, and the image of women in a contemporary light. His works, created with digital painting on canvas or photographic print, move along a border between symbolic figuration and inner resonance. In works like Lost (2022) and Fulmen Intus (2021), female faces stand out against almost abstract backgrounds, giving a suspended, evocative, and archaic dimension.

Other works, such as Untitled (2022) or Sospensione (2020), depict women as spiritual and silent presences, witnesses of deep but restrained emotions. The female body is an icon and an inner mirror, not an object but a sacred subject. Within the theme “Creative”, Andreini presents women as bearers of a visionary and symbolic imaginary that blends pictorial tradition and digital languages.

Paolo Tocchini

Livorno, 1964

Tocchini explores the female face as a surface of the soul, a place of tension between fragility and strength. His works, created with mixed techniques like plaster, sand, tempera, and spatula, deliver a lively, vibrant substance in which the face emerges as if sculpted by time and memory.

In Riflessi nello sguardo (2025) and La luce che è in me (2025), the female gaze becomes the centerpiece of the work: an inner eye, an emotional light, a mirror of deep experiences.

Works like Inutile che corri (2024) and Intimità di coppia (2024) speak instead of resistance and relationship, with tense faces imbued with silence and intensity. Tocchini aligns himself with the theme of Effetto Venezia by offering a powerful interpretation of women as complex entities, who through pictorial material are able to convey a world of invisible but necessary emotions.

Enrico Ristori

Livorno, 1971

Ristori offers an intense and poetic reflection on femininity through a selection of four works – two bronze sculptures and two oil paintings – that deeply converse with the exhibition’s theme.

In the bronze Omnia Vincit Amor (39x25x29 cm), a young woman embraces herself, depicting the strength with which love can bear the weight of the world. In Vivrai! (47x15x11 cm), a mermaid saves a child from a flood: an emblematic scene of the salvific power of the feminine.

With Stasera no! (oil on canvas, 100×50 cm), the artist narrates a chosen solitude with full dignity, while Cassandra (oil on canvas, 100×50 cm) represents an imposed solitude by vision and the ability of premonition.

Through emotionally charged painting and sculpture, Ristori explores women as archetypal figures, mirrors of the human, symbols of resistance and guardianship. His works convey a tension between dream and denunciation, between delicacy and strength.

Louises Will (Chiara Pellegrini)

Pisa, 1996

Louises Will tackles the theme of female identity in the present with poetic rigor and critical insight. In the series Le Vinte (2023), created with oil on paper, she portrays isolated female figures, static, immersed in neutral backgrounds devoid of narrative elements. These suspended presences – often faceless or lacking context – symbolize a fragmented, silenced, constrained identity. They are not defeated in a moral sense, but in a historical and social sense: women who have suffered, who resist, who bear the mark of oppression on their bodies.

Their stillness speaks, their absence becomes language. In harmony with Effetto Venezia, Louises Will gives voice to the urgency of denunciation through essential yet evocative painting, touching consciences and constructing a critical discourse without rhetoric.

Martin Lucchini

Florence, 1997

Lucchini reinterprets the female figure through three-dimensional and geometric construction. With his unique String Art technique, he composes portraits made of hundreds of tensioned threads on wooden bases, creating images that only emerge from a certain distance or perspective.

Works like Diana (2025) and Oneiric1 (2025) depict female faces that seem to float in space, suspended between presence and abstraction. The thread, as the quintessential feminine symbol (weaving, storytelling), becomes here a structure and constructive material, allowing the figure to exist only through a constant tension between opposing points.

Consistent with the festival’s theme, Lucchini interprets creativity as mental architecture, as an ordering gesture that shapes complexity. In his works, women are living constructions, thinking organisms, objects and subjects of seeing.

“Mirrors of the Female Soul” is an exhibition that reflects – in the truest sense of the term – the complexity and richness of the female gaze in contemporary art. The proposed works do not simply represent women, but act as devices of vision, as spaces to reflect on identity, emotions, body, denunciation, construction.

In the context of Effetto Venezia 2025, the exhibition becomes part of a broader cultural dialogue: not a rhetorical homage to female creativity, but an act of listening and valorization through the most powerful language we know – that of art.