GART Arte Contemporanea is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition The Veil of the Essential, presenting the research and new collection of works by Elisabetta Reicher. The exhibition will open on Saturday, 10 October at 5:00 pm at the gallery’s premises in Neive, Via Rocca 31, and will remain on view until 8 November 2026.
Elisabetta Reicher’s new body of work emerges as a visual meditation on the dialogue between Saint Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures (1225) and Stefano Mancuso’s Canticle of the Earth (2025). Eight centuries apart. Yet these narratives do not contradict one another; rather, they complement each other and reveal a striking continuity.
Mancuso revisits the Saint through the lens of modern science, transforming theological praise into humanity’s earliest manifesto of integral ecology. In particular, he highlights how the order in which Saint Francis lists the elements of nature is not accidental, but corresponds exactly to the list of fundamental requirements that modern science would identify as necessary to make a planet habitable:
Brother Sun, as the mother star;
Sister Moon, as the stabilising satellite;
Brother Wind, as the atmosphere;
Sister Water, as the hydrosphere;
Brother Fire, as energy;
Sister Earth, as the biosphere.
Saint Francis uses the terms Brother and Sister to express a spiritual kinship between humankind and creation. Mancuso translates this bond into biological terms, revealing, or bringing back into focus, one of the universal truths worth preserving: cooperation and mutual support, characteristic of the plant world, are the only attitudes capable of safeguarding life on Earth.
Elisabetta Reicher celebrates this epochal passage and connection — from theological brotherhood to biological cooperation — through painting. Her language consciously, or perhaps through elective affinity, recalls the Franciscan iconography of its origins. As in medieval gold-ground paintings and predella panels, her figures do not seek naturalism, but rather the symbolic. The lines are simple, assured, almost archaic. They do not describe; they evoke.
The artist embraces a principle that is at once Franciscan and radically contemporary: to subtract without taking away. The apparent simplicity of the finished work is the result of an intricate process. Each painting is constructed through dozens of layers of veiled colour, overlapping transparencies, erasures and re-emergences. It is a technique of levitation. Colour does not cover; it filters. The veil does not conceal; it reveals.
In this sense, Reicher’s work is ecological in its very form, even before considering its subject matter. The use of humble materials, understood by Francis as an act of stripping away, becomes in her practice a responsible management of the mark: nothing is excessive, nothing is wasted, each layer cooperates with the next, as in a plant system. Power and delicacy coincide.
From the veiled matter emerge the elements of the Canticle, not as illustrations, but as presences. Sun, moon, wind, water, fire and earth are not represented, but evoked through a chromatic vibration, through an incision of light.
The Veil of the Essential reveals how, for Reicher, painting is an experimental process through which she recounts and connects those individual factors — Franciscan and omnipresent in nature — that allow life to progress and continually emerge: the sun, the moon, water, fire, vegetation, and death, which is itself necessary to complete the cyclical nature of existence. For Reicher, painting has therefore been, from the very beginning, a form of visual ecology: it makes visible the invisible bond that holds us all as nodes within the same network.
