honorable mention
Nicoletta Cerasomma italy
title
Criptic Venus
What I want to represent in my pictures is her story and plumb the depth of her legacy that still affects our cultural heritage.
Although this character is based on a real person, the mystery that surrounds her lets the viewer enter an imaginary world, made up of ancestral fears and archetypes.
This is an introspective project focused on men’s worries such as solitude, suffering, incomprehension, detachment. This feelings floor the human being, unarmed and defenseless facing loss and confusion.
The Mansi family was well-known in the 16th century due to the trade of silk. Lucida loved luxurious things and sumptuous parties, as much as she loved being surrounded by lovers. Someone says she sat for hours admiring herself in the mirror. She was adored by men but people say she killed her partners after their encounters, by throwing them into trap-doors with innumerable sharp blades. Nowdays it is possible to see the trap near her bed in the villa. As the story goes, one day Lucida woke up and found a small wrinkle on her face and became desperate at losing her beauty. At that moment the devil appeared and promised her that she could remain young and beautiful for twenty years in exchange of her soul. She accepted. Twenty years later one dark stormy night, the devil reappeared claiming Lucida’s soul. she jumped into her carriage and began racing around the walls of Lucca but leaped from the wall ending up in a small lake where Lucida drowned. The ghost of the beautiful Lucida appears in Villa Mansi in Segromigno, where she used to entertain herself and kill her many lovers.
Her work is highly conceptual and complex: as surrealist artist, she incorporates archetypes and cultural iconography with satirical narratives inspired by the collective unconscious. Leaning into the visual language of pop surrealism, she stages narrative compositions that expose the underbelly of modern life.
Nicoletta is inspired by the dichotomy Beauty and Decay, themes that she loves to incorporate into her works in order to evoke contemplation and debate on human condition, through a vivid and provocative still imagery and a cinematic technique.
Her images come from personal place of exploration where she dreams to live a thousand lives in one.
Since 2020 she won a lot of nominations and awards thanks to her work which depicts women placed in suggestive scenarios. Presented for the first time to Sony World Photography Award her work was selected as a winner finalist in the creative category. She also won the Julia Cameron Award, the Pollux award and currently she is a chosen winner of the American Photography and nominated Fresheyes and Gup Magazine talent of the year 2021.
Her work was exhibited in New York, London, Moscow and continues to show in international galleries. She is currently working on new dyptich projects.
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entry description
The main character this project is a woman from Lucca, feminine figure that shaped her life based on her will. Doing so, she deprived herself of her own identity in order to become symbolic icon, the reflection of the society she lived in.What I want to represent in my pictures is her story and plumb the depth of her legacy that still affects our cultural heritage.
Although this character is based on a real person, the mystery that surrounds her lets the viewer enter an imaginary world, made up of ancestral fears and archetypes.
This is an introspective project focused on men’s worries such as solitude, suffering, incomprehension, detachment. This feelings floor the human being, unarmed and defenseless facing loss and confusion.
The Mansi family was well-known in the 16th century due to the trade of silk. Lucida loved luxurious things and sumptuous parties, as much as she loved being surrounded by lovers. Someone says she sat for hours admiring herself in the mirror. She was adored by men but people say she killed her partners after their encounters, by throwing them into trap-doors with innumerable sharp blades. Nowdays it is possible to see the trap near her bed in the villa. As the story goes, one day Lucida woke up and found a small wrinkle on her face and became desperate at losing her beauty. At that moment the devil appeared and promised her that she could remain young and beautiful for twenty years in exchange of her soul. She accepted. Twenty years later one dark stormy night, the devil reappeared claiming Lucida’s soul. she jumped into her carriage and began racing around the walls of Lucca but leaped from the wall ending up in a small lake where Lucida drowned. The ghost of the beautiful Lucida appears in Villa Mansi in Segromigno, where she used to entertain herself and kill her many lovers.
about the photographer
Nicoletta Cerasomma is a photographer and pop surrealist artist with a background in staged photography. After studying photography since 1997, she realized her love for storytelling so, in the latest years, she had evolved from fashion photographer to independent artist focused on production of nuanced photographic tableaux.Her work is highly conceptual and complex: as surrealist artist, she incorporates archetypes and cultural iconography with satirical narratives inspired by the collective unconscious. Leaning into the visual language of pop surrealism, she stages narrative compositions that expose the underbelly of modern life.
Nicoletta is inspired by the dichotomy Beauty and Decay, themes that she loves to incorporate into her works in order to evoke contemplation and debate on human condition, through a vivid and provocative still imagery and a cinematic technique.
Her images come from personal place of exploration where she dreams to live a thousand lives in one.
Since 2020 she won a lot of nominations and awards thanks to her work which depicts women placed in suggestive scenarios. Presented for the first time to Sony World Photography Award her work was selected as a winner finalist in the creative category. She also won the Julia Cameron Award, the Pollux award and currently she is a chosen winner of the American Photography and nominated Fresheyes and Gup Magazine talent of the year 2021.
Her work was exhibited in New York, London, Moscow and continues to show in international galleries. She is currently working on new dyptich projects.
back to gallery