Lucia Ferrara Never Perfect “Beauty is a question of love”
The artist Lucia Ferrara presents the work “Tav 2” part of the larger pictorial cycle of the NEVER PERFECT project, launched in 2017, for which the artist holds all rights.
Acrylic on canvas, dimensions 240×200 cm
“Never Perfect” is a social and museum project, but also a commitment, a mission to bring people closer, through art, to human stories.
The Never Perfect project is a story told through images and, as such, follows a structural logic similar to that of a book or a fairy tale, and on DNheArt, this is how it will be presented.
In October, the artist intrigued you with the presentation of the first work of the cycle, and now, we inaugurate 2026 with the second.
You should know that the works in the first cycle of Never Perfect do not have fixed titles; they should be read as a whole, but also individually, grouped together, which is why the artist chooses to number them exclusively.
The second work in question shows us a face, a self-portrait of the artist, surrounded by “worker” hands intent on bringing about a change, a metamorphosis, a theme dear to the creator.
Just as medicine heals, so too does the author heal the soul, working with an open heart on the victim of trauma, thereby “changing” its form, but not its essence, helping the victim overcome a trauma by transforming it into something else, in this case, art.
What is certain is that the syringe is an object that we could define as “toxic” in our society, as it opens us to scenarios of horrific futures, which the artist herself explored in other works before dedicating herself to Never Perfect.
Ferrara had already spoken about the dangers of mass standardization of aesthetic standards in her 2013 works. She was the first Italian artist to engage in this type of work/denunciation, which seems increasingly timely when we consider how AI and Elon Musk’s development of robotics (who declares that humanoid robots will be on the market within a year) will revolutionize the concept of physical and aesthetic perfection.
The idea of the syringe aims to offer the attentive viewer multiple themes, multiple interpretations, and multiple perspectives. In this specific case, for the Never Perfect project, those concepts focus on the possibility of healing, through the metaphor of surgical instruments.
We operate, we cut, we materialize the trauma and manipulate it through its pain, to defend the soul and heal it.
How much and what are we willing to face just to be reborn? Just to stay alive?
The artist simply knows pain well; she stages it in its most authentic, disturbing form.
Art like a scalpel that rips open our neon-lit consciousness, our (im)mediate society, the image as instantaneous sharing. In this (non)collective imagination that we all silently inhabit, as if in an aquarium without even background noise, Lucia Ferrara works more than a painting at every turn. Her artistic clinic—in the States they would call it “clinical art”—is not to be confused with a new, debased evolution of pop art: because Lucia Ferrara’s art has its roots in a culture reminiscent of Greek mythology. It is not the poetics of painting without depth: hers are not just paintings, they are frescoes of a past that is reflected in the present, scarring it. A scar that affects all of us who seem not to notice a society of spectacle that has replaced television with a mirror, that has deprived the image of sound.
Based on a review of Lucia Ferrara by Gian Paolo Serino
Lucia Ferrara
Contacts
luciaferraraofficial@gmail.com
