Francesca Banchelli's Duel Exhibition at Museo Novecento, Florence

The eighth chapter of the Duel cycle at Museo Novecento in Florence features works by Francesca Banchelli (born 1981 in Montevarchi). Her paintings depict fugitives who embrace, kiss, and dialogue, sometimes rendered as faint silhouettes or barely hinted faces, other times as dominant presences in saturated color visions. Suspended in undefined times and places, these figures seem to erase the conceptual distance from those portrayed by Scipione in his 1930 Apocalypse. Banchelli prophetically chose this work before the pandemic, and it now resonates with reflections on forced suspension, feared solitude, and the certainty of death. Yet, through material traces in her installative works and recent paintings, she opens a dual perspective: a tragic end or a new genesis, the beginning of purification.