Going beyond the surface, Monica Biancardi's light writing at the Banco Napoli Foundation

The technique involves writing with light engraved on sheets of plexiglass or glass (the negative to create a positive), which, when illuminated, reveal something else. The message: "Go beyond the surface." On Tuesday, September 16th, at 6:00 pm, the Fondazione Banco Napoli (Via dei Tribunali, 213) opens Monica Biancardi's exhibition "The Catalogue of Huts." Photographs, drawings, and objects that speak to domestic violence and hidden suffering. This important artistic and socially critique project began during the lockdown and continues today. The exhibition runs until October 15th. A mapping of the political world on glossy paper, to make it more truthful, of a terrible news story, which the artist annotates with red marker and pencil, matching certain dates to the names of those states where the most cases of violence were reported in the pandemic year 2020. At the time, Monica, like all artists, got to work and did nothing but collect data. Thanks to her work as a teacher, she discovered that there were many requests from students, who wanted to talk after class. From there, a world opens up: in every home, or rather "hut" as it is called, not everyone is safe, the worst things, horrors and mistakes, are happening. "We need to shed light," explains Biancardi. "Mine is an invitation not to stop at the surface, but to go beyond, learning to read and reflect above and within the shadows. “The catalogue of huts” is a study of photography in its infancy, but also a sharp cry of protest, a powerful blow that stirs the conscience, an invitation to go further, in a profound reflection that does not want and must not be exclusively feminine». The exhibition represents a continuation of Monica's artistic research, inspired by photography and plexiglass sheets, onto which she has engraved everyday objects, representing them as double-edged swords attacking the feminine sphere. Each piece on display is unique, has its own story, and is born from the fusion of photography and engraving. "The sign engraved on Plexiglas, the paper, and the photography," explains art historian Olga Scotto di Vettimo, "combine to give the work, along with the wrought-iron frames and museum-quality glass, a new complexity. Biancardi thus uses drawing as a preliminary study, to then produce a writing of light, made of images and shadows, employing a vocabulary as ancient as it is complex to give photography, still and in this present, new possibilities and poetic epiphanies." Shadows and traces of light on plexiglass are also used by Biancardi to reflect, through the five senses, on the dangers posed by seemingly innocuous everyday products linked to the clichés of the feminine world: Touch and the deceptive frivolity of the feathered fan; Sight and the bottle of eye drops containing glue; Smell and the perfume atomizer; Taste and the lip-stitching set; Hearing and the earrings that double as earplugs. Even the necklace/noose does not escape this logic. Nothing is as it seems. We need to shed light on it. Of the numerous cases of violence against women that art history records, Monica Biancardi chooses to capture three, capturing the faces of the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, raped in 1611 by Agostino Tassi; Costanza Bonarelli, lover and model of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who, out of jealousy, had her face slashed with a razor in 1638; and of the poet Faustina Maratti, victim of an attempted kidnapping by the young Giangiorgio Sforza Cesarini in 1703.

Biancardi, a Neapolitan artist born in 1972, graduated with a degree in scenography with an experimental thesis on theater photography. She began working for leading directors (while also teaching), while also pursuing her own research, which later led to exhibitions, and ultimately to writing with light. This year, her project "Il capitale che cresce" (Growing Capital) is among the winners of the PAC – Piano per l'Arte Contemporanea 2025 (Plan for Contemporary Art 2025), promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. MAN has acquired an extraordinary collection of eleven black-and-white photographs, taken between 2009 and 2023, which rigorously and delicately document the growth of Bedouin twins Sara and Sarah, whom the artist met during a trip to Palestine.

Exhibition card Title: The catalogue of huts Author: Monica Biancardi Book: Olga Scotti di Vettimo Catalog: Quodlibet Location: Banco di Napoli Foundation, Palazzo Ricca exhibition space, Via Tribunali 213, Naples, Third floor Opening Tuesday, September 16, 2025, at 6 p.m. Open until October 15, 2025 Opening hours: Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm Saturday 10am-6pm, Sunday 10am-2pm (last admission half an hour before closing) Free entry