Behind The Artworks: VACUA - Mater (2025)

The cover of Mater breathes with the weight of myth and ruin, carved into linoleum as though etched in stone. Its medieval lines evoke both ritual and memory, a visual echo of voices long buried yet never silent. At its center, a woman stands—Janara (a witch from the Medieval Southern Italian folklore) and Mother Earth entwined into a single figure. She is both progenitor and executioner, the cradle of life and its grave.

 

Behind Her stretches the wreckage of humankind, undone not only by its own hand but also by the soil it desecrated. Fire consumes, and still she turns her gaze toward the devastation. Is it concern that lingers in Her eyes, a flicker of regret, or the cold satisfaction of balance restored? In Her expression lies the ambiguity of Nature itself: to nurture and to destroy, to give and to reclaim.

 

Above, the Sun watches, weeping flames upon the horizon. Dawn or dusk—no certainty remains. Its tears carry pride as much as sorrow, for it is fire, the Sun’s own essence, that mankind wields to seal its extinction. What burns is not merely cities, but the illusion of dominion.

 

The choice of Latin—Mater—anchors the work in a lineage that flows from Rome to the southern folklore of witches and earth-spirits. It is a word at once sacred and severe, resonating like an invocation. In its syllables, the duality of humanity is mirrored: the impulse to create, the instinct to destroy.

 

The image is less a scene than a threshold. Behind, the ruins of man; ahead, the knowledge that Nature too will fall, pulled into the same inescapable spiral. The Mother stands at the fulcrum, not to save, but to witness.