“What is on the outside of you is a projection of what is on the inside of you, and what is inside you is a projection of the outside world. So often, when you delve into the labyrinth that is outside yourself, you end up penetrating even in your inner labyrinth.” (Haruki Murakami).

I confess that when we spoke with Marina Calamai about writing a short text to accompany the exhibition of her latest works, I had thought of printing the page as if it were a labyrinth, bewitched by the archetypal structure of its initiatory nature. Over time, beings have suffered a loss of the center and the labyrinth has become a way of wandering without direction, but not aimlessly.

Here, Marina Calamai’s work does not hesitate to be explicit, as it represents with a certain levity the complex “tortuous process that leads to the truth,” as Nietzsche candidly stated. A lightness without superficiality, as a succession of signs printed in extroversion on paper, a ball that unwinds like Ariadne’s thread, to form the barely perceptible appearance of a heart, diaphanous yet deeply imprinted like the emotions in our souls. In fact, Calamai’s labyrinths lead (or guide) us toward inner growth. While the art of the labyrinth embraces the darkness of uncertainty, the fundamental element in our journey is to identify the light, being, and not being at the same time. Finally, having discovered this new territory, considerable possibilities in contemporary art become apparent, in many respects another stratum in the domain of the labyrinth. Marina Calamai’s merit as an artist lies precisely in the development of a conceptual figure, one where the shape of the spiral becomes a symbol, allowing us to build a mental landscape of the extraordinary evolutionary flow forever present in nature.

– Nicola Nuti (Florence, November 2022)