"Serena Nono, paints. She communicates with lines and colours. With canvases and brushes. Intensely. She makes art. Slowly layering. Telling the pain. First of all. As it can be told when one makes art, "sublimating" it.(The word has become taboo, but it is still what the artist does.) Expressing but keeping at a distance. Sym-pathizing but helping to bear, because in a beautiful painting the pain, which remains pain, also becomes beautiful, not only painful but moving.(…) This pain is communicated, lived through together-told, and so made known and in that sense, made bearable. But not exorcized. Not repressed. On the contrary. But Serena Nono, because she paints only the pain of existence, paints also the possibility of fighting against it, the glimmer of joy."

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Paolo Flores d'Arcais, from Painting versus ideology, from the catalogue Figure,
Lineadombra libri ,2000