COMMISSION #15 – BEATRICE FAVARETTO

The IUNO commission by Beatrice Favaretto (Venice, 1992) consists of three images, each corresponding to an incarnation or a different face of Juno. Her threefold interpretation is conceived to reflect the goddess’s complexity—both iconographic and psychological: an elderly queen with a crown upon her head in the leftmost representation, the deity becomes animated in the central portrait, multiplying her image, and then partially reunites in the form of a young and alluring woman crowned with a constellation of eyes. If attributes such as these, or the regal headdress itself, can be traced back to the figurative tradition of the Roman divinity, they take on new and more contemporary meanings within the context of Favaretto’s aesthetic and theoretical inquiry. The very titles of the three drawings—The Queen, Obscene Liquids, and Voyeur—allude to the bodily and sexual sphere, to the dynamics of desire and carnal pleasure. Fantasies of domination, exchanges of bodily fluids, and paraphilias undoubtedly belong to the imaginative realm explored and developed by the artist, but it is above all in Hold me While I’m Naked, a collective archive composed of anonymous erotic stories, that the figures created for IUNO seem to find their echo. In Miele, the central voice of the project who embodies the experiences and fantasies transcribed by Favaretto, one can indeed recognize the same polyphonic and multifaceted nature associated with Juno—her ambivalence and her ability to reconcile conflicting impulses and traits, often dichotomous ones, such as empathy and vulnerability, cruelty and thirst for revenge. Through figuration, and specifically through drawing, these qualities emerge, revealing their contradictory nature: the use of a single, nervous, and wavering line serves this purpose, functioning like a seismograph—a tool capable of capturing emotional shifts, feelings, and personal inclinations.

Beatrice Favaretto, La regina, Liquidi osceni, Voyeur, 2025, inchiostro su carta