Sabrina Mezzaqui. Abat-jour

Render color of the table lamp in which they are distinguishable designs imagined for the lamp itself

The artist proposed the creation of a series of lampshades for the rooms of the children staying in the department. In the project documentation, published in the exhibition catalogue, she refers to a childhood memory of being lulled to sleep alongside her sister by the sound of a music box incorporated into a lampshade featuring an image of Topo Gigio. The project renderings show a sleeping baby in his bed, illuminated by the lights and reflections cast by the lamp into the room occupied by the young patient.

The project forms part of Mezzaqui’s artistic research, which has always been characterised by an intimate and delicate approach, as well as by an attentiveness to the everyday objects that surround us. Although the work does not involve the written word—the leitmotif of Mezzaqui’s artistic practice—it shares with her poetics a certain imaginative and narrative dimension, engaging the young user of the lamp through images intended to transport them into a fairy-tale world, with a specific reference to childhood and, consequently, to personal experience.

The interplay of light and shadow also frequently appears in her installations, as in The Light Words Between Us, created in 2004 using pages from a novel by Lalla Romano, and in her works made from perforated paper.