Elisa Filomena's Nightly Diary at Circoloquadro, Milan

Elisa Filomena (Turin, 1976) presents 'Diario notturno' at Circoloquadro in Milan, a body of work created exclusively at night, from 10:30 PM to 2 or 3 AM, every day. The exhibition features seventy-five drawings, three large floating canvases nailed to the walls, and thirty prints with direct intervention. Curator Arianna Beretta describes Filomena's nocturnal practice as a necessity. The works draw on old photographs, with female portraits emerging through subtraction and rarefaction from the untouched white of canvas and paper. The diary is anti-chronological, plural and solitary, ascending from darkness to liberate the invisible and unutterable. The exhibition references historical artists who worked in darkness: Goya with his palette of whites, blacks and ochres; van Gogh wearing a hat topped with lit candles; and Seraphine de Senlis, a maid by day and painter by night in a miserable room.