From the critical text by Manuela Limonta - Philosopher:

“In this series of images presented on the occasion of Fotografia Europea 2023, Ferri wants to recount three trips she made as a child with her family; to pay homage to three museums they visited as a family: Paris and the Centre Pompidou, London and the National Gallery, and Munich and the Haus der Kunst. In those places, Ferri found the aesthetic and ecstatic state in which art is stimulation and accumulation of sensitive experiences.

In childhood, the individual who stands before art is free from the judgment and trappings of taste, of canons, of criticism. There is no good or bad, but essentially Beauty.

Beauty, when it strikes you as a child, can become many things in human beings: depth, critical gaze, spirit of observation, patience, compassion, sensitivity, creativity, kindness, insight, ardor. In Irene Ferri, as happens in the stories of some artists, it has become art that expresses itself.

The images in this series tell us about the transition from the Idea that strikes to the Idea that expresses itself; from the Beauty that rests on the soul and in memories to the Beauty that grasps and becomes art. The artist has found it in the reality around her and brings it back to us: in objects, people, bodies, symbols that, in a right and opportune time, have become apparent and made those childhood aesthetic experiences resurface.

Sudden images, without forcing or artifice, that still want to tell, in a new form, in a fitting time, about the three museums.

Lines that start from the same story and meet in the dark blues and lights; in the Davids that are guarded in crumpled papers, in the backs that open to the light, in the Virgins that sprout among cellophane, in girls that spring from the woods and in the yet-to-be-finished lollipops.”