Iris Brosch and Fiora Gandolfi

The romantic Eden of Iris Brosch. If there is an Eden, it certainly cannot be better than the one imagined by Iris Brosch. An enchanted Eden, inhabited only by women, and therefore serene and bucolic, free from all sign of violence and macho force. An Eden with old, pre-Raphaelite recollections, an Eden that would have found favour with Alma Tadema, or with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his band of artists, dedicated to an ideal dream world inhabited by ethereal ladies and romantic knights. A thousand miles away from unrestrained consumerism and from the blatant display of sex of our now decadent contemporary world. What the artist imagines, in these Venetian works, is undeniably an ideal place in which feminine “Divinity” wins and is the absolute protagonist, ingenuously displaying her naked body, in a metaphysically perfect way, in a context where there is no room for voyeurism without poetry and where the fixed gestures call to mind an endless Botticelli spring. In these photographic sequences, Iris has therefore followed a dream of her own, that of an immaterial world where life passes amidst parties and innocent games, surrounded by benign nature, where young girls continuously play chases, immersed in a silent nature interrupted only by the rustling of the leaves and the playful babbling of the waters. The nudity of her women surprises us with their innocence, because it is a primitive, natural nudity, recalling the rustic vision of many Greek and Roman paintings. The women of Iris Brosch are like eternal goddesses or, even better, like sacrificial virgins consecrated to an absolute and perfect god, a god who magnanimously preserves them far from the misery, meanness and vulgarity of our world. All Iris Brosch’s work is far removed from any vulgarity, almost as though to give an imprint of this sensation of elegance and positiveness, and also in her work in fashion and advertising there remains a serene, positive world, never touched by the vulgarity of certain contemporary photography which focuses on the lowest instincts and the most sensational aspects of communication. In all this her world is unique, as it embodies the great strength of the positive side of the human soul; works which are certainly striking and fascinating for the nudity but which, despite this display of nudity, keep their distance from the “prudishness” of certain melancholy voyeurs and inveterate sufferers from sex phobia. The innocence of her girls, so disarmed and disarming, enchants and seduces us while, with the poetry of their bodies and the serene composure of their actions, they offer themselves naively to the spectator, in a kind of invitation to a world in which we would all like to live and by which we would all like to be carried away.