Dedicato a Miguilim is the title of Selene Cardia’s first solo exhibition at Doris Ghetta gallery: the exhibition unfolds as an exploration of painting understood not merely as representation, but as a process of knowledge and immersion in the visible. The title, taken from João Guimarães Rosa’s work, evokes the condition of Miguilim, a character suspended between perception and revelation, between a blurred vision and the realization of reality. Similarly, Cardia’s painting moves within a space of suspension, where the image is never fixed but emerges and dissolves in a constant state of transformation. Color, material and gesture become tools for exploration, composing a language that thrives on layering and intervals, presences and absences.
Selene Cardia, “Dedicato a Miguilim”, installation view at Galleria Doris Ghetta, Ortisei (BZ), photo Tiberio Sorvillo, Galleria Doris Ghetta
Cardia’s painting immerses the viewer in matter and time. Her works seem to retain the artist’s gesture, revealing the sedimentation of a practice that is rooted in repetition and care. Her approach to painting is almost ritualistic: stretching canvases, preparing surfaces, leaving raw edges exposed are not marginal details, but elements that assert the materiality of painting, bringing the process itself to the forefront of the image. It is not about narrating or describing, but about evoking, returning a fluid and porous perception, where color becomes breath, surfaces hold traces of time and the painting itself becomes a space to inhabit.
Selene Cardia, “Dedicato a Miguilim”, installation view at Galleria Doris Ghetta, Ortisei (BZ), photo Tiberio Sorvillo, Galleria Doris Ghetta
Nature is a central element in the artist’s work, not only as subject matter but as a lived and sensory experience. Cardia does not paint views or construct recognizable landscapes, but instead returns impressions and vibrations that emerge from a direct relationship with the environment. The connection to her native territory, the Sardinian land, both harsh and luminous, is palpable, yet never restrictive. The tones of green, yellow and red engage in dialogue with intense blues and deep blacks, evoking a dimension that escapes pure referentiality to become an inner place. As in Miguilim, where the protagonist discovers a new vision through a pair of glasses, Cardia’s painting is never immediate; it develops over time, requiring attention, a slow revelation.
Selene Cardia, “Dedicato a Miguilim”, installation view at Galleria Doris Ghetta, Ortisei (BZ), photo Tiberio Sorvillo, Galleria Doris Ghetta
While the large canvases envelop the viewer in a dense painterly materiality, the works on paper suggest a more intimate lightness, a different kind of breath. Each surface receives the mark differently and Cardia seems to play with this variety to explore the relationship between control and abandonment, between instinctual gesture and construction. There is never a singular narrative, but rather an invitation to linger in the indeterminacy, to be traversed by images that do not impose themselves but gradually surface like memories of an inner landscape.
Selene Cardia, “Dedicato a Miguilim”, installation view at Galleria Doris Ghetta, Ortisei (BZ), photo Tiberio Sorvillo, Galleria Doris Ghetta
In Dedicato a Miguilim, painting becomes a way of being in the world, a physical and mental experience that feeds on silences and intervals. There is no pursuit of a fixed image, no desire to close a discourse: what emerges is a constant tension between balance and instability, between the visible and what still eludes us. In this suspended space, the viewer is called not only to look but to feel, to inhabit the works with the same slow, attentive time with which they were created. Cardia does not offer answers, but opens questions, and her painting is the space where these questions take on their ever-changing form.
Info:
Selene Cardia. Dedicato a Miguilim
06/03 – 12/04/2025
Galleria Doris Ghetta
Pontives 8, Ortisei (BZ)
www.dorisghetta.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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