Isabella Ducrot

Critical text

Isabella Ducrot (b. 1931, Naples) started painting at a mature age, inspired by her great passion for eastern textiles. Having collected many specimens, some of them rare and precious, during her frequent trips to Asia, she decided in the 1980s to use some of them in original creations, thus depriving the artefacts of their historical significance. In 1989, in particular, she made a series of twelve works consisting of panels that incorporated fragments of a fabric from the Andes dating back a thousand years. This action, which was a watershed moment in her artistic career, acquired great deconstructivist—almost iconoclastic—value, bringing into question the historical aspect in order to concentrate on the material aspect as an element of creative regeneration. Precisely because they are made using existing fabrics, her canvases are almost never framed, but remain free to flow across the wall. Taking inspiration from eastern culture, in iconographic as well as in theoretical terms, Ducrot’s works adopt the decorative format of repetition as a means to approach a meditative state. Since the late 1990s, she has also made drawings with erotic subjects, which are themselves inspired by eastern tradition.

Text by Lorenzo Giusti