REDEMPTION MACHINES
FONDAZIONE PALMIERI LECCE
06.06 - 25.06.2026
Redemption Machines, presented for Lecce Art Week 2026 at the Palmieri Foundation, housed in the former 16th-century Church of San Sebastiano, explores the relationship between the body, institutional power, and redemption. Inspired by the history of the nearby Conservatorio delle Pentite, which sheltered marginalized women through paths of moral and spiritual discipline, the project reflects on how institutions have historically intertwined protection with control.
Bringing past and present into dialogue, the exhibition examines contemporary forms of surveillance, identity construction, and the regulation of bodies through religion, media, and digital technologies. A particular focus is devoted to the mysticism of Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Angela of Foligno, whose ecstatic experiences reveal the body as a site of both transcendence and discipline.
The paintings draw on contemporary photographs from Kensington, Philadelphia, where the fentanyl crisis has produced new forms of vulnerability. The postures of these bodies unexpectedly echo the iconography of religious ecstasy and martyrdom, creating a visual dialogue between addiction, care, control, and redemption, while questioning how different eras construct and interpret fragile and marginalized bodies.
POLYPTYCH
A pictorial device structured on two levels, an explicit formal reference to Jan van Eyck’s “Lamb of God” Polyptych.
The lower panels contain an earthly prologue, the side wings—populated by angelic figures—serve as a closure and sacred boundary. At the center, six female figures, depicted in various phases of monastic daily life. The cycle follows the rhythmic cadence of the Liturgy of the Hours, transforming the ritual gestures of waking, dressing, prayer, and confession into a broader reflection on the pedagogy of time and the control of the body.
The figures’ features are reinterpreted based on archival images of drug-addicted women’s bodies, captured in the abandonment and vulnerability of a fentanyl-induced fainting spell on city streets.
The sacred duty performed by the religious figure merges with chemical ecstasy and contemporary marginality. The female body thus becomes the canvas upon which an ancient and modern power is inscribed, a borderland where monastic discipline and the solitude of the street reveal themselves as two sides of the same, persistent self-denial.
ORDER TO THE CRISIS
The structure of the polyptych responds to a specific formal and conceptual imperative: to organize the crisis, translating it onto the pictorial surface as if it were a musical score.
Within this sculptural framework, each figure is accommodated and strictly confined to its place, held tight within its niche and contained within a geometrically defined space.
Through this rigid compositional grid, the vulnerable bodies of drug-addicted women are regimented into well-defined arcs, subjected to a spatial categorization marked and normalized by the ritual narratives of religious tradition.
Visually, the images effect a continuous shift in focus that oscillates between the macroscopic and microscopic dimensions. The viewer’s gaze is compelled to draw closer until it penetrates the material, magnifying laboratory-analyzed blood slides and microscopic portions of drug flakes and fragments.
This scientific-visual dissection is layered against a backdrop dominated by abstract and vibrant patterns—pictorial translations of acid-psychedelic delusions—transforming the space into a liminal territory where biological data, urban trauma, and spiritual ecstasy converge into a single, complex visual composition.
S.CATERINA DA SIENA
Saint Catherine of Siena—a mystic and Doctor of the Church—who lived in the 14th century, immediately distinguished herself through a radical spiritual experience marked by visions of overwhelming visual and physical impact, ecstasies, and corporal punishments.
Her life, marked by extreme and systematic mortification of the flesh, came to an end at the age of just thirty-three, consumed by a severe form of anorexia and malnutrition caused by fasting. Yet Catherine’s figure reveals a surprising and tragic contemporary relevance: rather than pathological isolation, the mystic managed to transform her private suffering into a tool of exceptional relational and political effectiveness, engaging in dialogue as an equal with the most powerful rulers, sovereigns, and popes of her time.
Recontextualized today, Catherine of Siena emerges as the archetype of a subject who transforms the extreme vulnerability of the flesh into a powerful vehicle for communication and dissent.
This figure undergoes an iconographic reinterpretation:
The starting point is an archival image of a woman captured in the midst of an urban fainting spell caused by a fentanyl overdose.
Multiple layers of imagery are superimposed onto this posture of collapse, combining digital manipulations created with TouchDesigner with screenshots taken from TikTok communities dedicated to eating disorders.
The composition is further disrupted by graphics that simulate the tracking and digital mapping of a body infected with leprosy.
S.ANGELA DA FOLIGNO
Ek-stasis—The Departure from Oneself
St. Angela of Foligno—known as the “Magistra Theologorum”—lived in the late 13th century and occupies a unique place in Western mysticism due to the vehemence and overwhelming nature of her spiritual experiences. Her visions of intimate union with the divine do not resolve into peaceful contemplation but manifest as cataclysmic events: a profound spiritual union with Christ that takes on the violence and destructive power of a hurricane.
This inner storm, characterized by public outcries, ritual self-flagellation, and an obsessive pursuit of pain, has led contemporary psychiatry and historical criticism to hypothesize profound psychological instability, psychosis, or madness. Yet, just like Catherine of Siena, Angela sublimates the disintegration of the self into a theological and literary output of extraordinary lucidity, capable of influencing generations of thinkers and undermining the rigid ecclesiastical structures of her time.
In the painting, the compositional framework draws on an archival image of a woman lying on the ground in the throes of a violent fentanyl overdose, her body drained and abandoned to a total loss of motor and cognitive control.
Overlaid on this posture of collapse are layers of paint that evoke the destructive fluidity of hurricanes and atmospheric disturbances, visually translating the devastating impact of the mystical union.
The background and the figure’s anatomical details are disrupted by the juxtaposition of scientific images and medical scans documenting the progression of schizophrenia in the human brain.
FENTANYL STUDIES n1
Fent I. The Subtle Illusion of the Filter
The work draws inspiration from the anatomy of a female body derived from archival images of women on the streets of Kensington, captured in a state of collapse and abandonment caused by fentanyl abuse.
The figure’s disjointed and dramatic posture is processed here through a “chromatic” digital filter—a visual texture that simulates a tattoo aesthetic suspended between the decorative and the mystical.
This technological device brings about a profound semantic alteration of the body, overloading it with an expanded, spiritual narrative: the suffering flesh is immersed in a visionary space studded with galaxies, artificial skies, and suggestions of immaterial lightness, evoking the romantic stereotype of the narcotic as a vehicle for inner openness and enlightenment.
Through this filter, the work triggers a violent and jarring visual short circuit. The mystical, celestial narrative generated by the algorithm stands in stark and dramatic contrast to the drug’s inherent deadly reality: a conceptual collision that lays bare the gulf between the aesthetic spectacle of the digital realm and the raw, tragic vulnerability of the biological body on the side of the road.
NEW ZOMBIE
FENT II. The Iconography of the Digital Grotesque
The work draws inspiration from the anatomy of a female body derived from archival images of women on the streets of Kensington, captured in a state of collapse and abandonment caused by fentanyl abuse.
In this second work in the series, the flesh is processed through a different painterly layer: the so-called “zombie filter.” It is a chromatic and formal texture that lies halfway between the techno-digital aesthetics of the 1990s and the pulp horror phenomenon, generating a markedly grotesque effect on the figure.
This filter acts as an immediate semantic catalyst, explicitly evoking the media and popular definition of fentanyl as “the zombie drug.” Through the exaggeration of somber tones, graphic distortions, and green skin tones, the work rejects the rhetoric of pity or ethereal aestheticization, choosing instead to embrace the aesthetics of the uncanny.
The painterly approach thus aims to provide a concrete and iconographically active narrative for an extremely complex social and biopolitical issue. By transforming the stigma of the “zombie condition” into an explicit visual motif, FENT II analyzes the codes of contemporary disfigurement and restores the body’s nature as contested territory, where chemical addiction intersects with the excesses of pop culture and screen culture.
DISMEMBERED BODY
Fent III: Computational Anatomy and the Algorithmic Body
The work draws inspiration from the anatomy of a female body derived from archival images of women on the streets of Kensington, captured in a state of collapse and abandonment caused by fentanyl abuse.
The work concludes the trilogy while maintaining the same methodological and conceptual premise of the “filter” concept; here, the body undergoes digital dematerialization, processed through a metallic, silvery “Blueprint” effect. The texture immediately evokes the frozen aesthetic of 3D renderings created with modeling software like Blender or the technical interfaces of graphic design and digital typography programs.
This technological filter erases the subject’s organic component, converting the body into a purely mathematical and vector-based surface: a technical image to be dissected, modified, enlarged, reduced, and manipulated at will. The dramatic reality of chemical addiction is thus absorbed by the cold logic of industrial design and virtual simulation.
FENT III shifts the focus of reflection to the total objectification of the contemporary body in the era of late capitalism and digital control. Stripped of its historicity and biological pain, the woman’s body becomes a mere geometric prototype, a modifiable “file” that lays bare the extreme violence inherent in the computational gaze: that technical attitude that reduces vulnerable existence to mere plastic material to be edited and configured on a screen.