This solo-show is the first Italian exhibition by the English artist Louise Hopkins, who lives and works in Glasgow.

She describes herself as “an artist who uses paint” rather than a painter and works with an original creative process: some of the works are made on the reverse of furnishing fabrics printed with floral patterns, of a sort commonly used in England for curtains or wallpapers, which she stretches like a canvas on the frames. Covering the fabrics with several layers of translucent gesso and using tiny brushes, with a selection of colours reduced to white and dark brown, Louise Hopkins replaces the originai pattern, now only faintly visible, bringing !ife to what has been previously hidden in the background.

Her painting project presents a challenge to the notion of traditional painting; she combines the artistic element with the everyday, the hand-made with the industrial product, taking its own piace between everyday life and high art. Hopkins’ research, which comes from minimalism, but is far from the rigid grid of the formalism, is conceptual and highly poetic, looks for a space’s notion as a surface vibrating and metaphysical, which reveals the pre-existent support.

The same original way of painting has been used in the “Songbooks”, where white gouache has been painted over the printed areas of song sheets. Hopkins whited out the words, staves and lines of a love song, so that we can see them just with a raking light, composed in a new melody.

In her “Land Maps”, countries and cities exist just as traces and suggestions.