Stefania Ormas - Rosalia

This painting of mine was created in 2017 for the group exhibition titled Rosalia at Palermo Airport. “Rosalia” is not just a portrait; it is a meeting point between sacred legend and the urgency of the present. I wanted to take the story of Saint Rosalia, Palermo’s patron saint, and strip away centuries of traditional iconography to render her a modern heroine, close to the struggles for self-determination that are still fought today. I chose to focus everything on the crucial moment: the act of cutting the hair. For a woman, historically, hair has been a symbol of beauty, status, and often ownership. Cutting it is a radical gesture of renunciation and freedom. I placed a pair of red scissors in the hand of this modern Rosalia, a color that screams passion and decisiveness. The gesture is suspended, not yet completed; she is there, in that moment of irreversible choice between the life that has been imposed on her (marriage, social obligation) and her vocation (the hermitage, spiritual freedom). To modernize her rebellion, I dressed her in a simple skin-tone tank top and gave her a contemporary look, with braids about to be cut. I endowed her with a tattoo in the shape of a cross on her forearm. This is not a symbol of sin, but a chosen mark of belonging, a permanent sign of her faith or her identity, a deliberately contrasting element with the crucifix hanging from her neck. It is faith made a personal choice, not inheritance. The background is intentionally dark, creating a dramatic atmosphere. The light cuts through the figure, illuminating the face and the act she is performing, coming from a stylized window that alludes to a passage, an exit. I added a collage element in the top right corner: a fragment of a poster from an iconic and rebellious work like Jesus Christ Superstar. This is my message: faith, passion, and rebellion are not static, but performative and dramatic. Rosalia does not retreat in silence, but performs a disruptive gesture. Her gaze, so central, is directed at us, the observers. Is she frightened? Determined? Is she a warning or a question? In my view, she is pure awareness. It is the challenge of someone who knows freedom has a cost. I wanted viewers, especially in Palermo, to ask themselves what it still means today to make a radical choice for one’s own autonomy. It is a work that speaks of faith, but above all of courage, of breaking the chains and of the freedom to be.". Stefania Ormas Italian painter, graduated in painting from the International Art School of Terni, in recent years has exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, such as: Casa della Cultura of Navacerrada - Madrid, Palacio del Infantado in Guadalajara, Museo Reina Sofía - Madrid, RED03 Gallery of Barcelona, Galeria Bernet of Barcelona, Roccartgallery Florence. Her works are in private collections in Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, America and publicly as in the municipality of Gata de Gorgos in Spain. The world she represents is predominantly female and she does it with a careful and realistic eye, always capturing a poetic vein. Her style is a compendium of the most recent painting forms, keeping tight control of her figurativism with attention to the anthropology of the character.