In this exhibition, Mediterranean Heart, Vincenzo Calli’s figures are captured in moments of stillness, contemplation, and reverie that seems to merge with the world around them. The figures seem deeply at peace in their lives and locations in a harmonious merging of nature, culture, and place. In this series, animals seem to affirm the dreamy contemplative moods of the human figures. Birds chirp the interior states of women swimming or dressing, and fish frolic with swimmers, almost as if stand-ins for their human counterparts’ inner joyfulness and emotional blending into the natural world. In one painting, a bather lounges in gentle dappled light by a creek or lake as frogs venture up the bank to join her, almost as if her reverie has summoned them, small compatriots in her gentle, dreamy mood.
