Our Guilt (Il ratto di Kore)

This painting is part of a series entitled: "Rats: the shadows within the silence".

In this series of artworks, I embark on a journey inside the darkest depths of myself to face the rats that inhabit my mind feeding themselves on my raw fear, anger, grief and shame. And, in sch a way, maybe, uncovering some universal truth the viewer can relate to, since RATS are the most common pests that live as shadows in everybody's home, voraciously munching the walls of our conscience both as individuals and a society. And when they finished raveging that, they're already so big, strong and more hungry than ever that it's quite impossible to keep denying their existence. They are there, in front of you, scary and ravenous amid the ashes of the life they have concurred to annihilate. 

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This painting appeared in my mind exactly as it, immediately after I finished the last one. It seemed to me like the natural follow-up of the previous oil paintings and illustrations where I explored the same concept and iconography.

The child at the heart of the painting, as most of the female characters in my artworks, is a representation of myself, even if for the first time at the age I was when my grandfather had sexually abused of me.

There is somenthing therapeutical, I think, to give a face and a body to the demons you struggle with, especially as survivor of any kind of abuse. 

The rats that inhabit the soul of a family tend to survive the death of the individuals to keep on passing down as an infectious legacy from to generation to generation until someone breaks the silence and face them. That's the responsibility I took on myself: first one in my family to break free from the intergenerational prison of silence. I was kidnapped and kept as a prisoner in my  underworld as Kore and I came out as the goddess Persephone:guide of the lost souls. 

And yet, in this painting, I portrayed my guilt - the guilt that I now, as an adult , share with the adults all over the world - looking with blind firmness and pointng at me with my own eyes and hand. Its the Kore of the past who revives with eyes and mouth sewn shut to remind me of of the billions of children in the world who we are letting down, giving them up to Hades' whim. Children, whose future we are not protecting or even straightly robbing them of.

They are burning, surrounded with the rats we have fed and let proliferate within the walls our homes, in the sewers and dumps of our cities, and they look at us for an answer we still can't give them