In her 2003 Concerning her life I, Luisa Raffaelli first introduced us to this image, which is now “revisited” – with the (almost) obvious addition of the blue and-white Fabbri jar at the centre of the table.
At the end of the dining hall, however, one sees a young man staring at us from a monitor, his gaze passing through first the Fabbri jar, then the red-haired woman and finally us, beyond the image. For years now the Turin artist has used depictions of young metropolitan women as the leitmotif in hyperrealist images which deliberately wrong-foot the spectator; and here she does so again. Whether red-heads or blondes, Luisa Raffaelli’s women do not seem to impinge on space; they are bound neither by time nor gravity as they would be in reality. Instead, they are rather like extraterrestrials or the replicants of Blade Runner.
Whether digitally modified or not, they remain unknown beings, objects of desire; they are expressions of an alien state where fear debilitates everyday existence.