As part of the programming at 480 Site Specific, Myrtus by Elisa Selli – born in Rome in 1992 – stands out as a pictorial project capable of weaving together rootedness and transformation, image and revelation, through a practice of attentive listening that unfolds in the silent dimension of matter. Selli, a young artist whose research moves between memory, rituality and landscape, presents an exhibition that becomes a threshold space, where the visible constantly hovers over what resists being seen.
Elisa Selli, “Myrtus”, installation view at 480 Site Specific, Napoli, photo Danilo Donzelli, courtesy 480 Site Specific
The works on view are paintings that do not shout but rather withhold. Their power lies not in declaration, but in slow accumulation, in the construction of images that seem to surface from within, as remnants, as apparitions. The artist’s gaze is trained on the smallest of details, on an interior botany where each leaf, each vegetal element, becomes a pretext to interrogate the act of seeing. The myrtle plant, which lends the exhibition its title, carries a dual significance: both symbolic (memory, death, rebirth) and sensorial, rooted in the physical relationship with the painted image. The main source of inspiration was the La Mortella garden that the English Lady Walton created on Ischia.
Elisa Selli, “Myrtus”, installation view at 480 Site Specific, Napoli, photo Danilo Donzelli, courtesy 480 Site Specific
Selli works on surfaces that oscillate between opacity and transparency, between layers that settle like sediments of time. In her practice, painting is not merely an expressive medium but a mode of understanding: it does not illustrate the world, but filters it, traverses it, transforms it. The artworks do not reveal themselves immediately: they are built in tension, always between appearance and disappearance. It is precisely within this delicate balance that the artist finds her language: a way of looking at the world that is also a way of looking inward. The images, the result of archive and selection work, appear filtered by a subjective time, where the past is never quite complete and the present is always already in dialogue with what has been. The artist does not offer a linear narrative, but a constellation of elements that the viewer is invited to connect, to feel rather than decipher.
Elisa Selli, “Myrtus”, installation view at 480 Site Specific, Napoli, photo Danilo Donzelli, courtesy 480 Site Specific
The dialogue with the exhibition space – curated by Alessandra Panelli under the artistic direction of Luigi Battisti – is essential to understanding the installative nature of Selli’s painting. These are not simply framed paintings hung on walls, but presences arranged in space like clues, like ritual remnants. Each canvas is a fragment of a broader discourse, a constellation of images that never claims to be complete, but rather operates through omission, through the liminal. Her works appear as latent apparitions, images in transit that settle on paper or fabric as traces, signs, shadows of something that has already passed and yet continues to act.
Elisa Selli, “Myrtus”, installation view at 480 Site Specific, Napoli, photo Danilo Donzelli, courtesy 480 Site Specific
In a visual culture dominated by speed and overexposure, Myrtus is a counter-current gesture. Selli compels us to slow down, to pause, to unlearn visual certainties in order to welcome a different kind of gaze: quieter, denser, more attuned. Her painting is a form of listening: to the landscape, to memory, to the body that looks. The exhibition itself acts like an image in waiting, like a thought that does not need to be spoken to be perceived. Green daily life.
Info:
Elisa Selli. Myrtus
09/05 – 09/06/2025
curated by Alessandra Pacelli
Direzione artistica di Luigi Battisti
480 Site Specific
Via T. Tasso, 480, Napoli
www.480sitespecific.com
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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