«At every stage bear Ithaca in mind.
The arrival there is your appointed lot.
But hurry not the voyage in the least:
'twere better if you travelled many years […]
for you will arrive wise and experienced, 
having long since perceived the unapparent sense in Ithacas.» 
Konstantinos Kavafis, Itaca

We had awaited her with anxiety, even with trepidation, for Marta Mànduca, in these years - far too long - she had spent away from the scene, and her mind was crowded with painful thoughts that insistently swirled towards something else. Since 1992, the year she completed the allusive plot of one of her most fascinating paintings, “Orpheus”, nothing more had been heard of this talented artist who had come into her own in the aristocratic world of surrealism. Nothing, despite her successes and the critical and public acclaim she had enjoyed for two decades, culminating in a very distinguished exhibition at the «La Barcaccia» gallery in Rome, no less, the gallery which during his lifetime had held the exclusive rights to the works of the 20th century's most significant painter: Giorgio de Chirico.

With the passing of time, surrounded by the fundamental support of the dearest affections and urged by an urgency - that for painting - dormant, but never less, here is finally Marta Mànduca returning to offer herself in that artistic limelight that had not waited in vain for her: immediately, an important anthological exhibition at the headquarters of the Region; to follow, the well-deserved mention in the historic Catalog of Modern Art (Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori), an authentic "bible" of the sector; now, this refined volume and the current exhibition in the prestigious spaces of the Matalon Foundation in Milan, which sanction Marta Mànduca's definitive and authoritative relaunch.

Here we find a magnificent sequence of both her more recent works – painted between spring and last summer – and those which marked her brilliant début: from “Maternity” painted in 1976 to “Oedipus” (A homage to Sophocles) painted a year later; from “Faust” (A homage to W. Goethe) dated 1978 to “Concept of the Intelligence”, “Nuptial Veil” and “Outrage to the Art”, all from the same period and equally significant.

The sheer length of the time span contemplated helps reveal the most fecund and recurring sources of inspiration mined by this extremely erudite woman. She has drawn, and continues to draw, heavily on mythology and music (“The Power of the Destiny” - A homage to Verdi, 1982), science (“The Origin of the Man” - A homage to Darwin, 1981) and literature (“The Birth of a Poet”, 1982).

However, some aspects - indeed peculiarities - are immediately evident, which, adequately clarified, effectively remove the possibility of dangerous misunderstandings or other hypothetical misunderstandings: in the refined painting of Marta Mànduca, the subject is, rather, fascinating as much as necessary expressive pretext; the iconography maintains, as usual, the due distance from the original starting point; in short, there is no didactic or illustrative tinsel in works that express an ancestral or dreamlike vision of reality, wisely transfigured.

In his compositions, symbolic references germinate everywhere, hidden memories, arcane references, truths and omens kept in that remote corner of the mind where the light is pearly and the colors appear nebulous as enigmatic clues, in the dull ashes of ancient events now apollonian now dionysian .

Thus, in the intriguing wake where multitudes of archetypes swarm, Marta Mànduca's painting conquers a Hellenic aura inhabited by singular Mediterranean thrills; moreover, the ideal essence of a cultured surrealism in which, hermetic, her moods coincide.

"The fascinating communicative magic of Marta Mànduca manages to reconcile classical myth and modern consciousness following compositional styles innervated with vivid and highly significant surrealisms".

The fascinating and invigorating communicative magic of Marta Mànduca manages to reconcile, through an enviable enthusiasm and dynamism, classic myth and modern consciousness following compositional styles innervated by vivid and highly significant surrealisms. A pyrotechnic and kaleidoscopic game of different colors that act as real retinal shocks, introduces to a complex world made of ancestral references, strongly current allusive meanings and symbols. The author adopts an almost filmic syntax to give body and "voice" to an inner map of feelings and situations, anxieties and desires that mythology, through its protagonists and heroes, continues to arouse in the intricate labyrinths of a deeply present feeling articulated. In Marta Mànduca, thought immediately becomes an explosion of forms, bursting vitalism, an appearance and, at the same time, a sudden resurrection of latent contents.

1. Conclusions about Marta Mànduca, as a thread to enter her exhibition? Her paintings are facing Piazza Di Spagna’s clear sky and they defy it; The monsters and the angels we have inside us, the only reality, inside and with us: in virtue of figurative and oneirical vocations they change into visions and forms, and overlap as tumults and crowds do, then, at the end, they brighten up in a painting that is meditation and prayer. A challenge between two different anxieties, in order to achieve the poetry’s unitary serenity. The inner conflict caused by a visit to the exhibition has to be imagined and resolved recognizing Marta Mànduca’s inventive power. But where this inventiveness comes from? Which is the inner moment that prepares it before it bursts into fantasy? And how does fantasy change into invitation to meditation?
2. It may seem too easy to make a cultural analysis of Marta Mànduca’s painting through its intellectual, symbolistic, poetical and philosophical themes and titles. We can even trace out a map of Marta Mànduca’s literary and artistic fondness. “Homages” to the myths of the culture are manifest. But the problem is very different. It is a question of investigating and ascertaining if this mental situation can be considered painting, too. And we must do it only with the pictures.
3. I Have made several attempts with my memory, to read again this painter, spurred by the allegories of her paintings. There is no doubt about the highly intellectual origin of the artist (it is clear and evident in her biography). And there is no doubt about the simplicity of her necessity of painting, which is like a biological component. Her painting is like speaking, thinking, living. Marta Mànduca seems to resolve the problem of life and universe – her ego in the universe – through the seventh day of the Creation, in her own fantasy’s image and likeness. Therefore, undoubtedly, her painting’s necessity is fair, and it is a spring-fountain. The positive moment, that doesn’t make her painting an easy instinctive phenomenon but an elaboration in which fantasy and meditation meet and blend (this is art), is perceptible by a long stop before her pictures, and by reading again in our memory. Then, you realize that what could seem a poetical-philosophical game of changing a thesis and an inner conviction into characters and visions is, on the contrary, the careful results of a conception which is strained to the limits of the faith. Therefore, it is a painting yearning for perfection and totality. It is clear that Marta Mànduca would like her pictures to be listened with the hearing and read in a loud voice, as well as with eyes and thought, as a page of poetry. In Marta Mànduca (that, in her exhibition, has dedicated a homage to Giuseppe Verdi) there is the Wagnerian tension of the global art.
4. The following passage has been extracted from a meditation of Richard Wagner for Beethoven. It is a passage in which philosophy and prayer are one thing only, becoming project and programme: “Expressive means go from a scream of terror to the most cheering and complicate harmonic combinations. Because of the fact that he (the artist) is urged, on all the innumerable intermediate degrees, by the need of communicating in a clear way his intimate dream, he approaches (as the second allegorical dream does) the representation of the watching brain, by the means of which he can finally keep the image of the dream. During this approaching he only touches the temporal forms, as extreme points of his communication, keeping the spatial ones under that impenetrable veil, whose raising would make the image of the dream unknowable…”. Richard Wagner’s attempt of describing the birth of the music goes on. But this passage is sufficient to describe, with distance and respect, the birth of the complicate, but however limpid, painting of our artist.
5. Music lovers could enter Marta Mànduca’s painting by the same way they used, for example, to understand and love “The Magic Flute” of Mozart, measureless height of the meeting of meditation with fantasy.
6. Musical painting? Yes, too. This is the answer. Because this painter, inside her, has got something like a revolving polyvalent little ball that expresses her desires and provides her with the ability of expressing herself in all the ways, in all the languages and in all the possibilities. This writing ball has also a religious anxiety, that would lead the artist to the Preaching and to the Apocalypse, if only her other vital component would allow her to do it. In Marta Mànduca there is the desire of silence, besides her desire of screaming and telling (she does it painting). The monsters and the dreams of her painting have tentacles, hands, lights and colours that, while spreading – so spreading as to stretch beyond the space of the picture – also give the sensation of withdrawing, retiring into their shells. Marta Mànduca is a model of introverted-extroverted artist, with her caresses-scratches, her open skies, her black storms. Everything in a baffling coloured brightness. This is the dualism that, in her painting, gives rise to a clash that makes her an autonomous artist to meet again.
7. I started speaking about conclusions. Marta Mànduca – maybe she has arrived in late to her potential degree of achievement – is at her first binding exhibition, her first meeting with the critic and public. Her exhibition may disconcert or it may convince. This is her advantage: to invite us to a trip in the fantasy and inside us, at the same time, with the danger of bad surprises, because we are her monsters, we are her dreams. The exhibition has to be analysed as a whole, as an album-diary of descents to the psyche and climbing to skies that only exist beyond the real sky. It is a painting that has to be absorbed with the eyes and with the thought. We must come near to it at the very moment in which we are tempted to give up the efforts of understanding and feeling. This reapproaching to the painter’s fantasy with a strong will, rewards us at the end, with silence and quiet isolation. Marta Mànduca’s painting arises from inner storms and – simultaneously- from elementary intuitive processes, elaborated by a mind that is trained to the culture. Like all the storms, this painting, at the end becomes silence: only painting. It is a dialogue between eyes and picture. Marta Mànduca is a painter that has to be understood with the practice of the culture and the swiftness of the perception.