Sono

History is taught as progress, but there’s something false in the idea that events move in a linear fashion, in one direction. When I look at history, I see what’s lost between the past and present, the material debris, the unrealized lives, all of which cannot be addressed by a forward-looking narrative. This is why I embrace a process of rubbing away and erasure in my text-based paintings, where language emerges and recedes, and letters flutter at the edge of abstraction. The viewer cannot read these paintings in a conventional sense, nor is there a code to decipher. However, in response to the horror beyond comprehension that we’ve all been witnessing, livestreamed to the phones we hold in our hands and stash in our pockets, one painting broke through with an offer of explicit legibility. In “Sigil 81” (2024), the letters “C-S-F-R” allow the viewer to fill in the gaps and read “CEASEFIRE,” a reminder that the violence outside the gallery is ongoing. This painting led me to reorient my process toward an exploration of the rhetoric that enables such violence.

The works in this portfolio are mainly from my most recent exhibition at Villa di Geggiano, Siena, in which I turned my attention to current Italian political speech. Inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s writings about the emergence of populist ideologies—he described them as “the monstrous, rigorous fruit of successive residues, sedimentations and survivals”—I wanted to explore Giorgia Meloni’s 2019 speech in which she personalized a political movement that seeks to reclaim traditional values. I titled the series Sono, Italian for “I am,” in order to evoke a tension between the presence of the artist and the well-known refrain of Meloni’s speech (“Sono donna”). While acknowledging the way her rhetoric worked on my emotions, I disentangled the historical “residues” in what she was saying by fragmenting the phrases on my canvases.

Once having turned my painterly observations toward the kind of doublespeak present in that speech, I began exploring the residues of the past in Meloni’s slogan “Dio, patria e famiglia” (“God, homeland and family”), with its origins in Italy’s earlier nationalist and fascist movements, as well as in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and in Netanyahu’s “Our victory will be your victory.” Circulating as fragmented sound bites in the media, these apparently simple and affirmative slogans conceal their racist and xenophobic essence while exhuming rhetorics of the past.

In these paintings, grappling with the regressive political language of our time, I explore the contaminations the past leaves with us, pulling us backward while altering our perception of the present.

—Rebecca Watson Horn

From top to bottom: Sigil 81: oil on burlap, 39” x 31”, 2024. Sigil 87: oil on burlap and canvas, 61” x 49.2”, 2024. Sigil 89: oil on burlap and canvas, 61” x 49.2”, 2024. Sigil 90: oil on burlap and canvas, 67” x 54”, 2025. Sigil 91: oil on burlap, 67.25” x 53.25”, 2025. Sigil 92: acrylic and oil on burlap, 48” x 40”, 2025. Sigil 93: oil on burlap and canvas, 67” x 53”, 2025. Sigil 94: oil on burlap and canvas, 67” x 53”, 2025.