"There’s an organizing principle that helps me make sense of the tragedy and joy, the anxiety and the beauty, the magic and mystery of the world as I perceive it now. And yet I know for someone else, it will read differently.” - Cecilia Granara
Charlotte Call Gallery presents Tempesta, an exhibition of new paintings by Cecilia Granara and the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, following Brittle Stars at Sapling in 2022.
These works extend Granara’s ongoing engagement with the human figure. While earlier paintings placed bodies in open color fields, the new compositions root their subjects in imagined terrains. Figures gain weight and presence through increased modeling, anchoring them within pictorial space. The title Tempesta, Italian for “storm” or “tempest,” evokes a sudden shift in atmosphere. Yet amid each painting’s charged tone, the figures emanate stillness and luminosity, heightened by contrasts of orange and blue.
Throughout the exhibition, subjects appear in choreographed constellations built from circles, wands, trees, animals, and radiant discs. Tarot remains a key source of inspiration, a practice in which the unconscious perceives patterns before language. Meaning here stays open, formed through intuitive, pictorial relationships rather than fixed logic.
