Methamorphoses. Chiara Crepaldi & Melania Toma: Critical contribution by Domenico De Chirico e Flaminio Gualdoni

Despite their profoundly different aesthetic and expressive choices, materials, and techniques, the two young artists undeniably share an idea of art based on the importance of transformation. They understand it as a creative process capable of generating extraordinary interconnections between reality and imagination, the human and the divine, distance and proximity, the visible and the hidden.

Metamorphoses aims to perceptibly explore the fluidity and consequent interconnection of forms, identity boundaries, and references to reality, without ever excluding profound changes and inevitable transformations from one form to another. In doing so, it becomes yet another opportunity to delve into fundamental themes such as ambiguity, inner conflict, dehumanization, transience, and the tensions between the inner world and external reality, embracing the vast spectrum of human experience.

Metamorphoses is a metaphor for the human condition, always poised between what is and what could be, where nothing is definitive. As the French scientist and philosopher Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier put it, “Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed.”

Metamorphoses creates images that blend substance and fantasy, giving rise to a liminal space where abstract bodies, forms, and symbols can freely exhibit themselves in continuous and rapid transformations, fearlessly bringing forth the unconscious.

And so, based on these principles—through desolation and rebirth, fullness and emptiness, intimate fragility and stern rigidity—there are, on one side, the vibrant sculptures and monotypes of Chiara Crepaldi, inhabited by clusters of imaginary figures and fantastical architectures. Crepaldi masterfully animates iron, bronze, and clay, infusing them with a vitality that suggests perpetual movement and breath within suspended spaces, where unexpected, intense, and subtle narrative interweavings unfold undisturbed. It is a journey inward that, beginning with intuition, passes through the anti-monumental phases of experimentation and transformation, challenges pre-existing conflict and tension, and ultimately reaches catharsis—that moment when the creative process culminates in an act of realization, where the artwork takes shape—between movement and stability, lightness and strength—and the artist experiences, after all, a sense of emotional release, granted solely by the inherent narrative power of sculpture.

On the other hand, there are the paintings of Melania Toma, where exuberance and stillness, organic forms and swift gestures, oblivion and overload, thin layers of paint and thick sand clots merge into permeable, pulsating, and mutable compositions. Here, the soft sensuality of the lines confronts the vibrant intensity of the color, which dominates and permeates the raw canvas. Through her organic, stratified paintings, she challenges the dichotomies between nature and culture—or the product of human ingenuity and its institutions and social structures—as well as beauty and imperfection, proposing a universe where differences dissolve in a continuous process of metamorphosis. Toma weaves personal myths and archaic symbols to propose a new visual language capable of transcending the human dimension and opening up to new relationships with the natural world. She is always driven by an irrepressible impulse toward the vast and fiery Empyrean sky, which eternally warms the most generous gatherings of terrestrial roots.

Thus, the two artistic practices—undoubtedly to be understood as spaces of liberation—first emerge, take shape independently, and finally merge in an attempt to counter the Anthropocene. In doing so, they rhythmically suggest alternative paths to consciously recover more balanced and authentic connections with the earth, with other living beings, and with ourselves.

Domenico de Chirico