Il segreto delle radici, 2024. Galleria Edizioni Cervo Volante, Bassano in Teverina (VT), Italy. Curated by Tommaso Cascella. 

 

                          Trippa e lingua, 2024. Fabric, synthetic filling, metal chain.

 

L'origine delle cose, 2024. Pencil on paper.

 

 

The secret of the roots

My curiosity for botany and biology met the work of Jessica Moroni and I came back to ancient drawings and lithographs of the first classifications of nature. Still unaware drawings of the DNA that is now the basis of every species and genus assignment.

I speak of the magnificent illustrations between 1700 and 1800, still full of wonder for the microscopic investigation, tables that made me discover the beauty and the mystery of unknown worlds. Beautiful hand-painted lithographs for their precision and patience.

Moroni’s work, in its expressive diversity and its non-scientific value, is uniquely poetic. His work has an ancient taste, almost a find in the eighteenth-century museum of the Observatory of Florence or in the seventeenth-century wunderkammer of Athanasius Kircher.

The world of the Moroni is underground, it is a sort of exploration of changing forms, of bizarre nature where botany becomes zoology.

Here, if read with this key to metamorphosis, the "sculptures" of Jessica are contemporary chimeras impossible to classify and, I would say, impossible to tame, to lead back to the living we know, are a different world, are an experiment.

The tentacles of its serious installations are both lianas of an unexplored forest and the tentacles of a giant jellyfish. His "totems" are made of grafts obtained with a Frankenstein surgery as much science is accustoming us to see.

But unlike so much art called "posthuman" made with resins and silicones, this of Moroni is sewn, shaped, painted, in short, made with that "technical ingenuity" that allows us to read it with an intimate and feminine look. His "monstrosities" have the seduction of a dress, have the irony of a mask, have the kindness of a mythical and incorrupt Eden.

In her drawings often recurs a woman/Eva who bathes in the bright transparency of welcoming water. Watercolors where the microscopic becomes a gigantic enchanted forest immersed in light and color, where the explorer’s journey is all mental and psychedelic.

But when Jessica Moroni takes us by the hand and accompanies us to her personal paradise, we sense with some anxiety, that the jellyfish/liana could be very dangerous and that colors could imply venomous abilities and where the chimera could come to life in an instant. A beautiful journey, this with Jessica, but also we could do the end of the fly in the carnivorous plant just sewn by the artist/ shaman.

 

Tommaso Cascella