Sit down and tell me
about all the art
that lives inside you.
All the images:
©Estate of Leonora Carrington, by SIAE 2025
Some lives move forward in straight lines, seeking a place to belong. Others, like that of Leonora Carrington, roam the world to invent another way of being. Shaped by rebellion and transformation, she lived between realms where dream and reality, myth and memory dissolve into one another. Painter, sculptor, and writer, Carrington refused to be defined. Neither muse nor object, neither solely a Surrealist nor a fixed icon, she embodied a fluid, multifaceted identity in which woman, artist, mother, traveler, and magical creature coexist. Drawn to the shadowed corners of consciousness where light and darkness meet, Carrington explored the occult, mythology, and the unconscious through her many female alter egos.
André Breton called her “an enchantress… with a clear, mocking gaze”, capturing her fascination with magic as a form of alternative knowledge. In Carrington’s universe, transformation is not an escape from reality, but a way to see it more deeply.
Born in Chorley, England, in 1917 into a wealthy family, Carrington showed an early artistic vocation. A formative Grand Tour through France, Switzerland, and Italy shaped her imaginative outlook, and in 1936 she moved to London to study at the Chelsea School of Art and later at Amédée Ozenfant’s academy. In 1937, she met Max Ernst, with whom she moved to France, where Carrington entered the heart of the Surrealist circle. Their life in Paris and later in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche ended abruptly with the outbreak of the Second World War. While Ernst was imprisoned as an enemy on account of his German nationality, Carrington was forced to flee to Spain. There, following a severe mental breakdown, she was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital in Santander. This devastating experience was later recounted in her extraordinary book Down Below (1944), a pivotal text that marked the emergence of writing as a parallel creative path.
After escaping to New York, Carrington married the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc, and in 1942 settled in Mexico, the country that became her true home and the foundation for the mature phase of her work. She remained there for the rest of her life, transforming trauma, displacement, and illness into creativity, and died in Mexico City on 25 May 2011.
Leonora Carrington’s work emerges from an imaginative framework shaped in childhood and continually reactivated throughout her life, where memory, fantasy, and myth merge into a coherent symbolic system.
Special thanks to Palazzo Reale, MondoMostre, Civita Mostre e Musei ed Electa for providing material for the major retrospective Leonora Carrington, held at Milan’s Palazzo Reale, curated by Tere Arcq and Carlos Martín, and featuring over sixty works that illuminate both her artistic career and her private world.
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The secret breath of images
There are images that do not tell a story but hold it. They remain suspended in a time that is never entirely past nor fully present, like a melody that continues to resonate even after the final note has faded. The painting of Jack Vettriano inhabits precisely this in-between space: a place made of waiting, of glances that brush against one another, of gestures interrupted an instant before they are fulfilled.
Each of his canvases is a silent invitation to step into a scene already in motion, whose beginning and ending the viewer does not know. It is a universe ruled by oblique lights, dense shadows, and atmospheres charged with emotional tension, where desire coexists with melancholy and elegance intertwines with a subtle sense of unease. Nothing is ever openly declared: everything unfolds in what is left unsaid, in the distance between bodies, in the empty space that separates one gesture from another.
Vettriano builds images that seduce without raising their voice, that draw the eye with the discreet force of mystery. His figures seem to move according to an intimate choreography, as if responding to an inner music – a slow, enveloping jazz – capable of guiding the rhythm of emotions. It is a painting that does not ask to be interpreted, but to be listened to, to be traversed with sensitivity, allowing what each viewer carries within to surface.
It is within this suspended dimension that the human and artistic story of Jack Vettriano, born Jack Hoggan, finds its place – a story that seems to emerge from a tale of another time, shaped by hardship, determination, and redemption. Born in 1951 in the county of Fife, along the Scottish coast of the North Sea, he grows up in a severe landscape, dominated by wind and by the labor of coal mining. From an early age, work becomes a necessity: at ten he contributes to the family’s finances, and at sixteen he leaves school to take a job as an apprentice mining engineer.
Far from any academic artistic path, Vettriano develops an autonomous, unmediated gaze. The turning point comes by chance, through a simple yet decisive gesture: for his twenty-first birthday, he receives a box of brushes and watercolors as a gift. He thus begins to paint as a self-taught artist, in spare moments, obsessively copying the Old Masters, the Impressionists, the Surrealists, and Scottish painters. Alongside these influences come classic cinema, noir atmospheres, advertising imagery, and a popular visual culture that would become an integral part of his language.
1988 marks his first official recognition: at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, he exhibits two works, both of which are sold on the opening day. It is a decisive moment, introducing him to the art world and prompting him to redefine his identity. Having moved to Edinburgh, he adopts the name Jack Vettriano, a reworking of his mother’s surname, Vettraino, linked to her Italian origins as the daughter of an emigrant from Belmonte Castello, in the Comino Valley. This change of name symbolically marks the beginning of a new phase, in which painting becomes a definitive choice.
Vettriano’s career develops rapidly, though it remains marked by a complex relationship with the official art establishment. His self-taught background and his choice of a figurative language that is openly narrative and emotional often earn him harsh judgments. Yet while part of the critical world remains wary, the public recognizes in his works a direct and authentic communicative power. His canvases do not impose interpretations; rather, they open emotional spaces, creating atmospheres that hold the gaze and suggest stories never fully revealed.
Vettriano’s paintings are populated by seductive, self-aware women, elegant and often unreachable, and by charming men whose power appears fragile and at times illusory.
The Museo della Permanente in Milan and Palazzo Velli in Rome host the retrospective of more than 80 works dedicated to Jack Vettriano. The exhibition is curated by Francesca Bogliolo, organized by Chiara Campagnoli, Deborah Petroni, and Rubens Fogacci of Pallavicini s.r.l., in collaboration with Jack Vettriano Publishing and coordinated by Beside Arts.
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Lee Gihun:
masks, childhood, and responsibility in a time of fragility
In the international contemporary art scene, Lee Gihun stands out as one of the most poetic, unsettling, and quietly radical voices of his generation. Born in South Korea in 1980 and raised in a context deeply marked by the contrast between natural landscapes and industrialization, the artist has developed a practice that occupies a space suspended between painting, symbolic narrative, and collective memory, shaping a recognizable and profoundly coherent visual language. Although his roots lie in editorial illustration, over the years Lee has naturally transitioned toward contemporary art, expanding formats and intensifying the pictorial and conceptual dimensions of his language.
At the core of his practice is the long-term project Masquerade, through which Gihun uses masked childhood as a key to reading the contemporary world. His works address themes related to environmental crisis, ethical responsibility, and the fragility of existence, without ever adopting a didactic or traditionally narrative tone.
Childhood as a critical space
In Lee Gihun’s work, childhood is never idealized. The children populating his canvases do not embody lost innocence but rather a condition of exposure and vulnerability. The masks they wear do not serve to hide an identity but to protect it: they become devices for emotional survival in an unstable world marked by ecological, social, and spiritual fractures.
The child figures are deliberately ambiguous – not entirely human, nor animal, nor adult – and inhabit suspended scenes, often silent or marked by signs of abandonment. In this indefiniteness, they assume a universal value, becoming attentive witnesses to changing landscapes and symbols of a generation inheriting a fragile and unfinished world. Childhood thus becomes a critical space, a mirror through which to observe the fears, guilt, and hopes of contemporary society.
Landscapes of transition
The environments in which Gihun’s figures move are not mere backgrounds but active narrative elements. Plowed fields, skies heavy with clouds, and enigmatic structures suspended between natural and artificial tell a story of a reality shaped by human intervention, layered memory, and the loss of balance between humans and nature.
Raised in a rural Korean village where industry and tradition coexisted, Lee Gihun carries this duality into his painting. His works reflect a constant tension between progress and loss, construction and abandonment, suggesting a broader reflection on how humanity inhabits and transforms the planet.
Ecological crisis and a non-dualistic vision
One of the deepest themes in Lee Gihun’s work is a critique of the Western dualistic vision that separates spirit and matter, human and nature. His works instead propose an interconnected conception of existence, in which every form of life is part of a fragile and shared system.
Climate change, biodiversity loss, and anxiety for the future of new generations emerge through a poetic and symbolic language. It is the silent, suspended images, dense with melancholy, that evoke a sense of urgency and responsibility, leaving space for personal reflection by the viewer.
Courtesy of Dorothy Circus Gallery and the Artist
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