Allegra Hicks. Divinazione

12 July - 30 October 2025

The Association “Amici di Gabriele Mattera” is pleased to announce DIVINAZIONE, an important installation by Allegra Hicks, to be held in various spaces of the Aragonese Castle of Ischia, from 12 July to 30 October 2025.

opening | Saturday 12 July 2025, from 7:30 pm to 11:00 pm

I had long been familiar with Allegra Hicks’ work as a designer. For those of us who love the world of architecture and design, her name has always evoked elegance, meticulous research, and a refined ability to create objects: her rich and original textures explore the natural world, evoking impressions that often transcend mere function.

Then one day, during a stroll through the labyrinthine heart of Greek Naples, I encountered her unexpectedly in an entirely new guise.

Hidden from view, in the crypt of the Church of La Misericordiella in the Sanità district, a vast drop of blood in heavy, theatrical red velvet loomed over me from the dusty, darkened stage of that underground space — an ancient site reclaimed laboriously, one bucket of earth at a time. In direct dialogue with the bones buried for centuries just meters away and with the stuccoed walls scarred by time and moisture, her work struck like a sudden, vibrant blow — a symbolic rupture, a wound emerging from Naples’ deeply layered and tragic past, bursting forth with drama and power.

That wound, that warm, vital liquid made solid — its sculptural clarity juxtaposed with the peeling, visceral walls — spoke to me in a language that was unmistakably feminine and contemporary. I could still recognize the designer’s hallmark elegance, now imbued with a gravity that felt urgent and profound.

In that very moment, I remember imagining this gesture recreated in the pure, luminous white of our Church of the Immaculate within the Castle. Here, the wound, the blood, life and death — all that is material, corporeal, and human — remain, yet in the purity and vastness of an unadorned, immaculate space, they are joined by catharsis, by a sense of beatification. The work returns to the light, offering hope beyond the pain of our human condition.

It becomes a kind of mystical prayer which — through the crystallized ex-votos, fossil-like in their stillness — leads us back to the origins of life, to archetypal and primordial forms of existence, in a cycle that has always accompanied our time on this earth. The monumental drop of blood stands out starkly against the immaculate white of the Church, yet we must not forget that it rests above the ancient hypogeum crypt of the convent cemetery, where the deceased nuns were laid to drain. 'Memento mori'.

Thanks once again to our association, Amici di Gabriele Mattera, the artist is invited to interpret this space through her own gaze and sensitivity. “Divination” is the title of her work — a premonition, an omen, a sense that everything is part of a constant transformation, that breathes us in and out of life, endlessly.

In Naples, there was flesh, blood, and corporeality; here in the Castle, light is added—the spirituality of eternity, of time that passes relentlessly, and the acceptance of our fleeting presence.

Anna Cristina Mattera

Amici di Gabriele Mattera