This artist explores the relationship between our bodies and the cosmos

Exposed bodies are everywhere in Rome. Be they suffering, ecstatic, heroic, pious, clothed or nude, representations of the human form are omnipresent throughout the city’s 900 churches, statues, sculptures and fountains. While visitors to religious sites are encouraged to respectfully cover their own profane and mortal flesh, the figures immortalised in the city’s sacred spaces are less modest. From altarpieces to frescos, friezes, painted ceilings and the classical effigies that preside over Rome; from the marble thighs and draped limbs of Bernini’s sculptures to the tender, exposed soles and twisted torsos of hallowed Caravaggio’s, Rome is rife with nudity.

Prior to the opening of their latest exhibition, Wynnie Mynerva spent ten weeks in the city making work. Presagio [Omen] at Fondazione Memmo is the culmination of the Peruvian artist’s two-and-a-half-month residency in Rome and the theme of bodies foregrounds the show. Moving through charcoal, paint and hand-blown Murano glass, the exhibition contemplates the human body not just in relation to illness, trauma and the cosmos but as a part of those systems, organisms and experiences. 

Adrift from the rhythms of the natural world, we’re socialised to think of ourselves in isolation, as hermetically-sealed vessels, as if our skin were not a permeable membrane but an inviable barrier between our bodies and the world. Mynerva reframes this idea and all encourages us to consider a more holistic alternative. “It’s the body as part of an ecosystem, neither central nor periphery, but almost in symbiosis, in connection with everything around it,” explains curator Alessio Antoniolli during a walkthrough of the show. 

As someone who suffers from chronic illness, Mynerva explores this dimension of bodily experience in a large-scale monochromatic triptych – the first artwork you encounter when you enter the exhibition. Here, illness is characterised as a spectral form haunting the protagonist of the pictures – a separate entity attacking or encroaching on the body, but this relationship between illness and its host develops in each of the three charcoal drawings. Antoniolli says, “[In each picture, illness]  becomes much more of an embrace rather than something that invades, something that shocks the system. From binary black and white, the light and darkness change into something more complex.” 

In the next section of the exhibition, four large circular, convexed paintings are hung on the ceiling, recalling the baroque artwork adorning the city’s many churches. Each collates a particular bodily system (reproduction, digestion, lymphatic and respiratory) with a cosmological system, creating a constellation of organs, tissue and flesh. “The more you look at them, the less abstract they become,“ says Antoniolli. “You start noticing the kidneys, the liver, the stomach, the intestines, and you can look around the various paintings and you can see all these different systems.” 

“It’s the body as part of an ecosystem – neither central nor periphery, but almost in symbiosis, in connection with everything around it” – Alessio Antoniolli

Looking towards the ceiling to contemplate the work also recalls the vantage point of a convalescent. Interpreting from Spanish on behalf of Mynevra, Antoniolli says, “The positioning of the view changes and suddenly something happens. Of course, the first immediate reference is to the churches and palaces you see around Rome but also, going back to the idea of the illness, [looking up to the ceiling] is also a position that the ill body puts itself in. Wynnie was struck by this essay by Virginia Woolf, which says that when you’re ill, your position and your view of the world changes as you’re laying in bed. But there’s also this idea of tragic moments of illness when you look up to the sky to find answers.”

“It's a way of looking at the body and its relationship to constellations and the sky... so it's another way of thinking about the body in a much more expanded way” – Wynnie Mynerva

Mynerva adds, “There is also another reference that I find particularly interesting, which is this sort of ancient theory from the early Greeks and it's a way of looking at the body and its relationship to constellations and the sky, to the point that people that were actually trying to cure or understand the body by making connections with stars in the sky, whether it's the Zodiac, new stars, the moon, or the sun, they found all these correspondences. So it's another way of thinking about the body in a much more expanded way.”

The third and final section of the show feels like entering a magical grotto. Painted and carpeted in the same Yves Klein blue of the previous space, a low floating plinth displaying hand-blown Murano glass sculptures that suggest ocean organisms or bacteria viewed through a microscope. “These are called treasures,” Antoniolli tells us. “And glass conveys this idea of fragility, but also the danger that glass can cut you. It's also about beauty and preciousness.” 

Hand-blown, the treasures are in fact made with breath. Life, in effect, is breathed into them by the glass-blower who, under Mynerva’s fastidious instruction, gave them form and shape. As with the rest of the work featured in the show and created here in Rome, the density of meaning is as layered as the city in which it was made. 

Wynnie Mynerva: Presagio, curated by Alessio Antoniolli, is showing at Fondazione Memmo until November 3, 2024.