• Journal of Modena| Thursday 26 March 2026 | Culture&Entertainment, page. 47 | article by Michele Fuoco | The works of. intertwine relationships with the past Geranium e Cristina Iotti https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1599905782139208&set=a.72728995351

  • These ghosts

    Certain images contain residues that pass through time, signs that resurface as latent presences of past experiences. To describe similar phenomena in the context of the cultural productions of the beginning of the Third Millennium (music, cinema, literature, television), Mark Fisher recovered the concept of Hauntologie[1] coined by Jacques Derrida[2]. For the French philosopher, this term indicated the condition of an entity in which presence and absence coexist, undermining every concept of linear temporality. For Fischer[3]Instead, Hauntology was above all a way to signal the persistence of traces that continue to exert an influence on the present through objects, faces and signs that come from distant times. The late English writer described these presences as resonances that remain operational, suspended signals that find a place of re-emergence in certain expressive forms. This also applies to the visual arts, where the image, in whatever form it presents itself, can welcome elements from distant experiences and reorganize them through different techniques, as happens in the work of Cristina Iotti and that of Paola Geranio.

    The comparison between the two paths highlights a point of contact in the relationship that assemblages and paintings establish with the past, a relationship that manifests itself in each artist in distinct ways, but with the same intensity. The image, in both cases, incorporates a spectral component that brings remote elements into the current visual construction. These ghosts are revenants who return through materials, objects, gestures and colors connected to the past, entities that seem to reactivate when they are integrated into the visual apparatus of the work. (…)

    [1] He finishes hauntology comes from the fusion of two French words. The first is haunt, which means “to haunt”, “to wander around like a ghost”, and is connected to English to haunt; the second, ontology (ontology), the philosophical discipline that studies being. There hauntology it therefore concerns the study of a misaligned time, in which the past returns in the form of an undecidable presence: neither completely present nor definitively absent.

    [1] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. State of debt, work of mourning and new International, 1996, Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milan.

    [1] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of my life. Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futuresti, 2019, Minimum fax, Rome.

    Non-Compliant is the title of the cycle of works by Cristina Iotti dedicated to women interned during the twenty years of fascism, a story inspired by an article by Stefania Delendati, originally published on «Superando.it», the portal promoted by FISH (Italian Federation for Overcoming Handicaps), and then taken up by numerous websites.

    The stories of these women are filtered through medical records that stigmatized their entire lives in a single word. Adjectives like naughty, unstable, irreverent, talkative, impulsive o extravagant they were, in fact, used as symptomatic categories sufficient to commit a woman who exhibited abnormal behavior. These were terms that did not correspond to any medical diagnosis, but which were sufficient to erase identities, relationships and experiences. Iotti's project was born from the desire to give a face back to those figures, putting back into circulation a historical matter on which, for decades, the most absolute institutional silence was maintained. It is the story of a humanity liquidated in formulas and stamps that reveal the background of a health policy used as a disciplinary and punitive device. The artist's work starts from medical records - where administrative writing obscures and falsifies the identity of the person - to try to compensate the memory of those lives through a regenerative process, which mixes photography, assembly, drawing and digital generation of images.

    The creation of the faces of the inmates, women often unjustly judged to be mentally ill, represents the initial phase of Iotti's work, which uses Artificial Intelligence as a tool to build credible physiognomies. Here technology is used to create a plausible face and, at the same time, to provide an emotional substratum to the victims of what has been defined as the "great mental hospital internment" in Italian history.

    To avoid stereotyped solutions, the artist had to proceed with successive attempts, micro-corrections and progressive adjustments, until the gaze, posture and features of each face reached the maximum degree of verisimilitude. It is not just a question of realistic rendering, but of credibility: a face is a map of stories, a diagram of traces of existential experience.

    Once the physiognomies have been generated, the artist prints them with the ancient cyanotype technique which gives the images the characteristic Prussian blue colour. These prints are then immersed in tea and coffee infusions to attenuate the original chromatic imprint and burnish the surfaces so as to make them similar to those of vintage photos. Then, on the modified print, Iotti works with pencils to give more light and volumetric compactness to the figures. The manual intervention insists on even minimal details, which define the physiognomies with greater precision.

    The decision, made during the work, to insert these portraits into a wooden drawer, accompanying them with the addition of objects and photographs, completes the reconstruction process. Iotti's drawers, a bit like Joseph Cornell's boxes, are treasure chests of memory, domestic containers and miniature archives where identity is associated with objects that the artist collects in antique markets or in private collections. They are vintage photos, notes written with uncertain handwriting, newspaper clippings, old worn lace, fragments of upholstery, coins, buttons, holy cards that form a material and emotional testimony. Inside the chest-drawer, the label taken from the medical records completes the semiotic system of the assembly. Inserted next to the face, the adjective becomes evidence of the violence perpetrated by the power apparatus, a system for disciplining the body and voice of women who "do not conform" to the regime's expectations. Cristina Iotti's intelligent operation, on the border between art and historical news, shows how the potential of Artificial Intelligence in the generation of images, the charm of ancient printing processes such as cyanotype and traditional drawing techniques can converge in an operational practice capable not only of structuring stratified and complex images, but also of being able to translate into visual language a story that institutional writing had relegated to the margins of History.

    Ivan Quaroni

    From the exhibition presentation text: These ghosts

    Bipersonale Cristina Iotti | Paola Geranio | Laranarossa gallery, Modena

  • ..." Cristina Iotti also reflects on the theme of vanitas and in the Waltz of Flowers series she reinterprets small floral compositions in a seventeenth-century key. Each work is born from a cyanotype, then reworked with colored pencils on paper: a complex and layered technique that requires precision and attention to detail. The cut flowers, splendid but ephemeral, therefore become an emblem of the fleeting nature of life, but at the same time they urge us to contemplate beauty and fully live the present."... Nicla Ferrari (from the text in the exhibition catalogue: Useless pain made a seed of beauty, Palazzo Scaruffi, Reggio Emilia. Nov 2025

    ..."the flowers finely drawn on a blueprint base by Cristina Iotti immerse us in the blue light of a clear sky crossed by the pleasant warmth of the spring sun..." Ivan Cantoni (from the text in the exhibition catalogue: Useless pain made a seed of beauty, Palazzo Scaruffi, Reggio Emilia. Nov 2025

  • "...Cristina Iotti is one of those artists who have taken great care of manual skills. Before these works, which I will tell you about immediately, she drew for years, meticulously and with profound technical expertise, with colored pencils. She won the ARTE prize with these works of hers. Here she decided to find a mediation between drawing, which she still practices with her expertise, and a proto-photographic technique which is cyanotype, that is, she uses light on a photosensitive material to imprint with blue, which is the color that always comes out in the cyanotype, because it takes these vibrations of the sunlight and then, with its skill as a designer, goes on to draw the flowers. What effect does this have? it is one of the forms of photography, and she applies her expertise as a designer capable of imitating nature in an extraordinary way as only a few can do.” Ivan Cantons (from the presentation of the exhibition: Useless pain made a seed of beauty, Palazzo Scaruffi, Reggio Emilia. Nov 2025

  • "It takes courage to be a flower. To hatch the light without knowing if the wind will be kind, to let yourself be caressed by the sun without fearing the time that passes. In the series" being a flower "the artist captures an instant of fragility and wonder, intertwining the magic of cyanotype with the delicacy of the atella and pencil. Its flowers float on a deep sky. Eternal.Luciano Di Gianni , from the exhibition catalog SPRING
  • .. "The absence is a key element in the representation of the female. Cristina Iotti, in the series of drawings entitled the shadow of the body, investigates this aspect through the representation of the folds and traces left on a bed, memories of a experience, which reveals the delicate and fragile beauty hidden in the transitality of existence. | Ivan Quaroni , taken from the text in the catalog of the exhibition “The female in art, Seregno, 2025
  • Catalog of Modern Art | C.A.M. Editorial Giorgio Mondadori | 2022 Art Award finalists page | https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=594021616060968&set=pcb.594021946060935
  • ARTE Cairo Publisher | November 2022 n.591 | p. 52 |article winners and finalists Arte Prize exhibited at Palazzo Reale (MI) (section photography)

    https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=572574444872352&set=a.72728995351

  • ARTE Cairo Publisher | June 2022 n.586 | Art Award finalists article (section photography)

  • The exhibition was born from Cristina's dramatic and loving intuition in the presence of her parents' "beds of pain". Every fold, every crumple of the sheets tells of restless, often sleepless nights. This story in images, unrepeatable in its rawness, cannot be ignored, on the contrary, it must somehow be saved and protected. With patience and dedication, Cristina portrayed the marks left on those daily shrouds, so that they tell us about the sufferings of the body, while avoiding its representation, a pregnant absence/presence, made even more dramatic by the chiaroscuro, meticulously outlined in pencil. A way of investigating human affairs by giving voice to personal objects, as in Diderot's "Indiscreet trinkets". The evocative and engaging drawings by Cristina Iotti bear witness to suffering and love, a way of not forgetting and giving new life to the very concept of realism.
    Carlo Micheli (for the exhibition “The shadow of the body”), 2022
  • Over the years we have had the opportunity to appreciate the combination of the delicacy of his stroke and the sweetness in his attitude. Her profiles and the necks of women, then the masterfully executed dresses and laces, those magical icons of imaginative tenderness, as well as flowers that explode with colors on the walls. Cristina is a muse among pencils, tools dear to her, where she knows how to grasp the right combination of shadows and feelings. Now his artistic maturity embraces that poetry that is always harmonious, but more profound and tragic, in catching between the folds of the sheets, the shadow of the suffering bodies of his father and mother, in their unmade beds photographed in the morning. With sensitivity and skill he has been able to immortalize these sweaty and tormented shadows of his parents through chiaroscuro executed with patience and devotion. The sheets like shrouds, take the shape of every movement suffered, when getting up is torture after a night spent in pain in the limbs, with no future. Today all these hanging niches envelop us like icons of a journey, a diary, in which hope and experience fill the casket of our memory. Cristina has not only suspended shadows, but living presences which, through her pencils, have taken a different path, in each of her works we feel their breath and warmth. Let us allow ourselves to be enveloped by her engaging and nostalgic personal trait, us and her united in a visual and sensory symbiosis. With tenderness we will feel the impulse to metaphorically fix a fold of sheet or fix the pajamas in these beds that we will all now observe and caress with a less distracted soul and gaze. Cristina has managed to combine love with art because she knows how to speak from the depths of her own self.
    Anita Peterle ( presentation of the exhibition "The shadow of the body"), 2021
  • Catalog “Great Painters of international realism in 20×20” with the collaboration of the Meam Museum (Barcelona)
  • Rest of the Pug | Dec 29 2021 | art . inauguration of the exhibition 'The shadow of the body'
  • ARTE magazine, Cairo Editore | Semi-finalist article Arte Prize 2021 (section photography)
  • "Artistics-Female emotion in the arts" catalog | Emilia Romagna Legislative Assembly
  • ModPortrait Catalog Special Edition 2020 | Art Gallery
  • Catalog yearbook ARTE Y Libertad XV | artelibre gallery
  • Article "Art has therapeutic value", Maria Giuseppina Bo | Resto del Carlino, Reggio Emilia edition | July 16, 2020, page 20
  • Catalog “Your best painting – Your best painting” | ARTELIBRE Gallery
  • Cristina Iotti conducts its research on the plane of apparent simplicity, masterfully creating real icons of femininity, focused on external attributes (lace, flowers, embroidered dresses, hands with long manicured nails). But these are details, parts of the body, while her face never appears, so that the figure, unrecognizable, becomes the archetype of a timeless femininity, all delicacy, elegance, lightness.
    Carlo Micheli (text for Figurabilia), 2020
  • Catalog yearbook ARTE Y Libertad XIV | artelibre gallery
  • Catalog “20 years, in 20×20” | artelibre gallery
  • Yearbook Catalog ARTE Y Libertad XIII | artelibre gallery
  • COLORED PENCILS

Colored pencils spread out waiting
of a soft touch as a lover
small gesture chooses harmony
small sign creates the magic

Carthusian fairy weaves the warp
playing with light fingers.
I would also like to be revealed
so much symbiotic beauty

Colored pencils, some worn
they speak and know they are much more
if only you will touch them to choose one
to make it a timeless, evanescent creature

That touch and that color admired by me
which are rainbow words
only words and verses and poet's dreams
surprised tonight that we flew so high

Anita Peter

interview on Heroine’s Journey:/https://theheroinejourney2016.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/the-heroines-journey-of-cristina-iotti/

Colored Pencil Magazine February 2018 issue. Tutorial article “Lace&Tulips” pag 6,7,8,9

“To the point” | June 2017 | Colored pencils Society of America Magazine | page 27 Explore this 13 selected artworks article and page35 Artspectation 2017-2018 presentation

“To the point” | January 2017 | Colored pencils Society of America Magazine | page 44 | ArtSpectation winners article

group exhibition article TWELVE | Journal of Reggio | 02 December 2016

CRISTINA IOTTI'S CAMEI

The freshness found in the first dawns distracted by a graceful smile as pure encounter of a light manipulates secrets kept in intimate contact. Cristina Iotti inscribes the flowery dialogue, an accent of just a shadow spasm vain from that shiny sip, like a tepid awakening in the quiet of joint distances. The author traces, sails, sketches the tonal apparatus of the measures; a slow, intense, deep breath, briar of feeling the light rise. Cameos of spring dews arouse surprises of fulfilled expectations, those of the hours enraptured by the confused flow to stay means the response of a bank wishes threshold to reach for the drunk cup quenched, in the miracle of innocent romantic palm. Gray is white.

Riccardo Melotti 11/15/2016

article shows 10mar46| Diecimarzo 46 by Nicla Ferrari, “Il Giornale di Reggio”, 8 October 2016, p. 24.

article shows 10mar46| “DieciMarzo46” 70 years after the vote, Gazzetta di Reggio, 7 October 2016, p. 22.

article shows 10mar46 | Long live women!, Reporter, year 29, n. 39, from 7 to 13 October 2016, p. 4.

This breathtaking piece appears to be incomplete but is so perfectly complete. The flower and stem are the focal point supported by the exquisitely rendered hands positioned against a background of an intricately drawn lace dress. The identity of the model is unimportant to this statement. The title Life #10 indicates a symbolic attachment to the composition. I am left curious to view her compositions Life #1-9. I chose this as Best of Show because of its fusion of drawing skill, composition, symbolism and mystery. JEFFREY BAISDEN Judge of ArtSpectations 2016-2017

DRAW Portrait in colored Pencil -Ann Kullberg edition – http://annkullberg.com/collections/books-more/products/portrait-book

Gazette of Modena 24-12-2015 – article shows #circle_of_life

Exhibition catalog #circle_of_life | Tiziana Severi Contemporary Art

interview by Giulia del Cappellano for Art Workshop

yearbook catalogue ART AND FREEDOM X , Artelibre Gallery

“Strokes of Genius 7: The Best of Drawing”; Depth, Dimension, and Space (North Light Books, 2015) http://goo.gl/UZhKuC

“…Cristina Iotti tells about the absence. The absence of a body. Of a person. Of a face. Of a name. In his drawings, which are distinguished by their meticulous and delicate technique, the figure disappears and what remains is nothing but a wooden hanger, empty clothes, wallpaper. The artist depicts old clothes, which belonged to herself, or inhabited by others. Dresses full of memories. Uncertain, suspended, fluctuating presences. Full of melancholy.”… Melissa Magnani taken from the article: ” TISSUE: when fabric tells stories“-ART meeting online magazine

“…Cristina Iotti finally removes the figure to leave only the dress – described with a skillful and virtuosic technique combined with the delicacy of colored pencils – an emblem of an aesthetic factor but also a place of memory. It is no coincidence that the ones she depicts are all clothes that belong to her linked to past moments, which appear as places where the personal mnemonic aspect imposes itself. The author intends to suggest a suggestion with the same suspension of the clothes themselves which are never worn but only hung, and seem to almost take the shape of those who have "inhabited" them in a certain sense, giving them the word through the movements of the body. Emptied of all their weight and of the encumbrance of the limbs, illuminated like improbable theatrical actors, since the figure is almost never deliberately represented, they are like floating and covertly melancholic beings who, hovering in a timeless and indefinite emotional space, made of textures and paper wallpaper, lace and flounces, impose an absence that represents a pregnant and defined presence…”

Francesca Baboni (from the introductory text in catalog of the exhibition TISSUE – Corte Ospitale, Rubiera (RE) – Sept . 2014

( …) And the girls of Cristina Iotti also appear out of time, almost embroideries in pencil and pastels who tell us, amidst lace and arabesques of astonishing precision, the little all-female drama of choosing the dress. (…) Alessandra Redaelli, from the presentation text of the exhibition “Feminine, plural – Looking at the world” Biffi Arte Gallery, Piacenza

– Reggio Gazette 10/01/2014

– Reggio Gazette 03/01/2014

–“BY CREATIVE VOICE” INTERVIEW BY GIOVANNA LACEDRA FOR ELLEPOURART

Colored pencils on paper instead of chromatic paste on canvas. Yet the realistic effect is unsettling. Yes, because Cristina Iotti is one of the few Italian artists able to raise a graphic technique to a true art tool, obtaining effects of an extraordinary pictorialism even in the essential layout of his compositionsi, which mainly consist of one or two subjects, mostly portraits in the foreground or half-length.

Graphite and colored pencils are used with neo-Renaissance mastery and lenticular virtuosity, to outline the soul and reveal emotional nuances. Investigating the figure in the anatomical and physiognomic details as well as in the expressive ones, to operate a sort of psychological investigation (which brings me back to the portraits of Antonello da Messina), until revealing, from work to work, an exclusive geography of the female psyche

Even when they are portrayed from behind, the young women drawn by Iotti seem to invite us to follow them on their existential journey. Subtly and in a low voice. Standing out against backgrounds that seem to transpose them into a dimension of natural stillness: carpets of leaves, floral embroidery. An imaginary forest of dreams. The fairy forest. Colors and shapes with which to tell the poetry and courage of being a woman(…)

Giovanna Lacedra – taken from the interview for Ellepourart

Ann Kullberg CP Treasures Volume II http://annkullberg.com/ https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153583866490352&set=a.72728995351.153967.42822435351&type=1&theater

“Another journey” - Andrea Guastella at 125 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153583864765352&set=a.72728995351.153967.42822435351&type=1&the ater

ART Mondadori – October 2013 N°482 -FLASH column edited by Nicoletta Cobolli Gigli – at 151

article of Pencil Art Society A PAS-SING GLANCE

written by Erica Walker, Vice President, Education Chair of Pencil Art Society (Canada)

Cristina's girls are the essence of femininity. Often lonely and silent girls, immersed in their thoughts; other times in pairs, awkward, elusive or impertinent, sometimes. They are young and probably very pretty, even when we can only guess it, observing them from behind, naked and sensual or imagining them, half-hidden by a candid transparent veil that partially covers their features. They are women of our time, very current women, even if they show themselves with a certain reluctance, hiding, blending in, almost taking refuge in the delicate plot of the background, to escape probably indiscreet looks. (…)

Paul Infossi from the presentation text in the catalog of the group show "The Ladies of Time" Open Space, SaluzzoArte 2013 - Amelto Bertoni Foundation, Saluzzo

-(…) Emila Sirakova, Cristina Iotti, Claudia Leporatti are muses devoted to beauty, to the patient expression of secret and precious feelings and gestures: they operate with the power and mystery of visual seduction. (…) – Stefano Strong , taken from the presentation in the catalog of the exhibition "MUSE", Galleria Gagliardi, S.Gimignano

– Cristinainstead, with A New Day represents the elegiac dimension of Man.

Amazement before the world and its beauty, tempered by the melancholy that all will be lost.

But Time, in its cruelty, will never be able to take away from us the memory of what we have loved.

article by Alessio Brugnoli

– Hypatia online magazine October-December 2012 – pag 24-25-26-27 Download pdf

– Resto del Carlino – attachment “Sassuolo&ceramics area” - 5/10/2012 – pages 2-3 Download pdf

– (…) and Cristina Iotti instead carry on a research on femininity and motherhood. (…) Cristina Iotti removes all frills, leaving only the decorative landscape background to her stripped and naked girls. Stately faces and bodies become the fulcrum of an assertive and dialoguing femininity, which universally gravitates around a nature that presents itself as a modern earthly paradise, made up of small and highly refined microcosms modulated with the effect of cross stitch embroidery… (…)

Francesca Baboni Taken from the introductory text of the collective exhibition ICONIC – Galleria Rezarte (RE)

– artist of the month october 2012 Colored Pencil Magazine- Featured artist october 2012 issue – Cover + pag 10-11- 12-13 http://coloredpencilmag.com/ http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/441629 (pp. 10-11) (pp. 12-13)

“All the successes of our winning boys” by Alessandra Redaelli ARTE Mondadori – Cairo publisher – N. 466 June 2012, pag. 71 (revised page)

Cristina Iotti – Of grace and femininity – by Giovanni Magnani. Often it is the art exhibitions that offer opportunities to meet interesting male and female artists, whose works lend themselves to being taken into consideration for publication. always brings new propositional names to the attention of the monthly's admirers. This May release is dedicated to an artist from Modena, Cristina Iotti, a painter from Sassuolo where she lives and works, author of works of extraordinary grace and refinement. She graduated from the I.E.D. of Milan (school of Illustration), she has been active in the world of art in Italy and abroad for more than a decade, where she has achieved and continues to achieve significant recognitions; among these: First prize in the graphic section Arte Mondadori 2007 and 2008 – Faber-castell Special Prize 2007; in 2008 you figure among the 30 most representative artists of the 23rd Edition of the Agazzi Prize; you are present in a group show in the Main hall of the Council of Europe building in Strasbourg; since 2008 you have been collaborating with Costa Crociere which has commissioned several works for the suites and common areas of the ships “Luminosa” “Deliziosa” “Fascinosa”; finally, she appears in important publications, reviews and galleries. The artist, who loves to portray female heads and depict young women, "cuts them out - as Giuliana Mazzola recently wrote - on elegant arabesque backgrounds, tapestries, fabrics with the lightness of colored pencil that isolate her figures in space and time" . It is surprising, in fact, how Iotti, using an ancient and only apparently simple technique such as the use of pencils and pastels may seem, manages to make her works so current, so light, so alive and captivating. The artist's ideational faculty is consciously realized and defined through an individual, precious graphic design, the result of a rigorous and constant exercise and application. The artist in his sheets who then applies rigid supports, enhances femininity not only with elements - flowers, ribbons, bijoux - exquisitely feminine but, above all with the softness of the chiaroscuro, of the delicate, diaphanous chromatic intonations, with carefully studied and of the, we could say, golden harmonic compositional distribution, at times also from the photographic angle. Graphic - pictorial works, those of Iotti, which presuppose on the part of the artist an attentive study of the admirable drawing heritage of antiquity, from which she draws lessons that are undoubtedly functional to her works. Iotti's figures are living creatures, delicate like the light that grazes them and the air that touches and moves, at times, the threadlike hair. The cover image is significant of the degree and particularity of the genre that the artist's works express. The titles created to crown the completed work are also singular and lyrical.
Text of John Magnani taken from the monthly Ratio – number 5 – 2012 (p. magazine)

Cristina Iotti's girls are often solitary, immersed in their thoughts, in environments finely decorated with wallpaper. They are probably very beautiful and sensual, even when we can only admire them in profile or from the back, while a soft light redraws the contours of the hair, the ponytail, the curls or a cascade of smooth and flowing hair on the shoulders. But even her and her girls show signs of an evolution, of a change.

Paul Infossi – taken from the introductory text of the exhibition “Women, only and simply women” Open space, SaluzzoArte 2012

Intervista Monthly BLOG – year IV n.19 November 2011 page 31

Four Glimpses – pg. 20-21 http://issuu.com/glimpse/docs/blu

“ART AWARD – All the successes of our boys” – ARTE Mondadori April 2011 pag – 47-48 (p. magazine)

"In Brescia investigation on women"– An unconventional femininity is the theme of “Crysalis-feminine wraps” in Brescia from Hinterland. Too shy to show their faces, the girls drawn in colored pencil by Cristina Iotti reveal to the viewer only a hint of profile silhouetted against a floral background.

ART Mondadori - March 2011 page 163 (p. magazine)

On the body (and soul) of women - from Alessandra Redaelli This is a complex historical moment to talk about women. Leafing through the newspapers, we find ourselves faced with a bleak panorama. You are besieged by armies of little girls who, as their only dowry, have a pleasant face and a nice pair of legs, but who defiantly stare at the viewer posing as icons of style, role models, so painfully bundled up in squeezed dresses, hoisted on stroller heels, adorned with hypertrophic and designer accessories. A coarse laugh buried years of feminist battles, marches and claims. And we, the middle generation, find ourselves lost today, poised between barricaded mothers and dangerously glamorous and doll-dolling pre-adolescent daughters; the mothers from whom we stole the latest issue of Amica to secretly read Barbara Alberti's letter column and the daughters who steal our cosmetics to look like the tissue of the moment. So it becomes terribly complicated today to think of an exhibition on women. Which woman, first of all? Chrysalis, female wrappings is a reflection that from the body, the wrapping, descends to the depths of the woman's soul. A shy woman, perhaps frightened since she is living is the one who offers us only a hint of profile in the works of Cristina Iotti. They are very current, the girls of Cristina, in jeans and trendy blouses. But they hide an ancient, timeless soul in their denial of a direct, too indiscreet gaze, in taking refuge against those floral backgrounds until they blend in with them. A mimesis in progress, barely perceptible, which is revealed in the light continuation of the decoration, like a tattoo, on the skin. Cristina Iotti is a virtuoso of drawing. In the use of colored pencils you have reached, in recent years, an ability that leaves you amazed. The details of her hair, the soft strands escaping the complicated hairstyles, are rendered with photographic precision. As well as the grain of her skin, its very slight change of color on a bare back, constricted by a thin shoulder strap. Over her time, her girls have changed. Before they were faceless bodies lost on neutral backgrounds, sometimes even empty, almost a floating nothingness. Gradually the heads were defined. Rigorously turned, however, to deny the face to allow only the nape. Today girls are starting to dare more. Some show themselves, even if only the forehead is in the foreground and the eyes remain excluded, lowered. Someone else grants a glimpse of the face and looks off the field. Only one decisively raises her gaze towards the viewer. But it's not authentic security, hers. Rather a provocation, a gamble. Witness the oblique smile, vaguely arrogant, and the rebel tuft standing on the forehead. (…)

Alessandra Redaelli From the text in the catalog of the exhibition "Chrysalis - female wraps" Galleria ENTROTERRA, Brescia

… (…) Cristina Iotti continues with her coherent search for chromatic lyric with some very new unpublished works, portraying young female heads cut out on elegant arabesque backgrounds, tapestries woven with the lightness of colored pencil which isolate her figures in space and time. The Iotti girls are distant beings who, however, keep us close to their essence through very personal and everyday objects, such as a hair clip or a pair of earrings, or with direct gestures and looks, intimate details that protrude from the paper to make themselves present to us in their immediacy. From the pencils of Cristina Iotti, female figures full of reality emerge, for which a certain empathy is shown, faces that are part of the daily experience and of the personal and affective sphere of the artist. Her characters are often caught and portrayed from behind, rarely frontally, as if to let us enter their world without making noise, in the second row, so as to allow us to catch them in their state of reflection and assortment. A terse style with a well-organized space, where the mood of the women depicted presages a process of inner transformation to move from an old identity to a new one, with awareness and determination. (…)

Giuliana Mazzola From the introductory text of the exhibition "Chrysalis-female envelopes" Galleria ENTROTERRA, Brescia

“Art on board – the Costa Cruises traveling collection” – Skira Editore a cura di Martina Corgnati – pg. 135 “The refined Modena painter (she was born in Sassuolo, one of the centers of Italian ceramics) draws and paints with techniques that require meticulous and slow execution, in contrast to the speed that characterizes our contemporary lifestyle. Pencils and colored pencils are used to obtain photographic and almost hyper-realistic effects. The protagonists of her paintings are great women, almost always portrayed from behind, ordinary people who, in their daily gestures and in particulars caught by the artist, let their personalities emerge in some of the most intimate aspects. This is how the thoughtful and elegant girls placed in the standard suites of Costa Luminosa hide their faces from us. New Venus instead, on the stern stairway, is executed in graphite, colored pencils and Indian ink on wood: a moment of everyday life that is reflected in the eternal ideal of beauty. The artist returns aboard Costa Deliziosa, participating in the multi-handed decorative project involving the forward stairway, L'Eterno feminino. The bather by Ingres is literally mirrored in a contemporary bather who mirrors her, between hyper-decorated oval frames and rococo brocades. The past returns in the updated forms of the present. (Martina Corgnati) (page book)

Monthly potpour. Issued December 20, 2010 – monthly online magazine of photography, art and culture Article “Sguardo di donna” by Emanuela Cinà – pag 92-93 ,94-95 http://www.potpourrimensile.com

Cristina Iotti's drawings tell us about a meticulous and skilful contemporary symbolism narrated through an artist's hand and a woman's heart. Her works enjoy a single dimensional dislocation when the subject is immersed in a vintage background, a wallpaper full of curvatures and shades resulting from the poetic imagination of the artist from Sassuolo. Her women are solitary characters and never agglomerations of people, her girls show us persuasive shoulders and hair that is tactile, perfect, incredibly real, to be followed like Rimbaud's dreamy Tom Thumb who "speaks rhymes" to find his father's house . The sum of her works imposes the excessive power of language as a place of identity that flows into a thought that is a tear understood not as a trivial laceration but as a trace, scar, indelible sign. Cristina Iotti with her solitary and enigmatic, sensual and poetic women, invoking a relationship or elusive in fear of an uncertain contamination, disseminates signs and symbols, traces of alphabets that compress stories and tales, knead together distant geographies to which, over time, transversal grammatical components are added. The colored pencils in the hands of this refined artist manage to combine the classicism of the twentieth century school with a stumbling block determined by postures, segments, transversality and personal code that place her in an absolute contemporaneity of which Iotti is the undisputed and exquisite protagonist.

Martina Cavallarin (from the presentation of the personal exhibition “Lo gaze elsewhere” – Sediabianca project room @ Galleria della Cornici – Lido di Venezia – November 2010)

…and again the enigmatic and timeless girls from behind by Cristina Iotti, in contrast with the arabesque background of the work, seem to escape the inquiring gaze of the spectator.

Chiara Canali (from the catalog text of the Metropolitan Baby exhibition, Previtali gallery, Milan – Nov. 2010 )

Instead, use Cristina Iotti colored pencils for drawings with a photographic style and a very refined technique. Her teenagers show us their backs, we only see the back of their clothes, the hairstyle of their hair, the clasps of their necklaces. Details captured with care and precision, which reflect the intimate and poetic side.

Emma Gravagnuolo (from the catalog text of the Metropolitan Baby exhibition, Previtali gallery, Milan – Nov. 2010 )

With colored pencil, which he uses with astounding precision, Iotti narrates the dreamy atmospheres of adolescence; very elegant, decorative, his designs are imbued with a deep melancholy.

Alessandra Redaelli (from the catalog text of the Metropolitan Baby exhibition, Previtali gallery, Milan – Nov. 2010 )

The colors and portraits of Cristina Iotti – Interview on the monthly DUEMILA, monthly cultural information of the North-East. no.8/9 2010 p. 6-7 (p. magazine)

Are artists born or made? The floor to Cristina Iotti Interview by Emanuela Cinà May 2010 http://www.equilibriarte.org/suryanna1980/blog/artista-si-nasce-o-si-diventa-la-parola-a-cristina-iotti

Costa Luminosa, phantasmagoria of light – ELECT book – pg. 107 (page book)

“…and again the painting…, the soft and happily feminine one of Cristina Iotti…”

Alberto Agazzani From the text in the catalog of the exhibition "A Window on the World" - Catania - Diocesan Museum, December 2009

Cristina Iotti is a figurative designer who uses a meticulous technique for the realization of her works, which are denoted by a great formal cleanliness and extreme precision. Everything can be seen from the details of the clothes worn by the young women who populate her artistic universe. Women who reveal themselves in their insecurity or in their decision according to the situations they are called to face in life, but who never lose elegance and composure.

Fiordalice Sette from ARCHIVIARTI 2009, The Exhibition – Fabbrica Borroni, Bollate October 2009

Left alone on an appointment or lost in daydreaming, they are rendered with astonishing definition and with a love of color that occasionally prompts the artist to flee towards the abstract.

Alessandra Redaelli From ARTE Mondadori N. 432 – August 2009 – Drawing article (Italian) pag.50-51 (p. magazine)

…Some of the authors presented in these pages came from the recent hatching of the Arte prize, from Cristina Iotti, whose delicate pencils on paper are gaining collectors…

from ARTE Mondadori n° 430 – article “Low Cost Painting, young people to buy” by Stefano Castelli and Alessandra Redaelli (p. magazine)

LUMINOSA the new floating museum

Costa Crociere confirms its attention to contemporary art with the new Luminosa, launching these days. A traveling museum with 286 unique works and over four thousand multiples. They range from the imposing bronze Donna Sdraiata by Botero to the paintings by Casagrande&Recalcati dedicated to jewel women, from the oils by Elisa Rossi, to the pencils on paper by Cristina Iotti, up to the crocheted copper wire sculpture by Resi Girardello

ART Mondadori No. 429 May 2009 pag. 73 ARTEFACTS column by Alessandra Redaelli (p. magazine)

Dear Cristina, I got to know your works electronically and on glossy paper and I had a great desire to observe them closely. They are really very beautiful. It is incredible how you are able to express, with absolute economy of means, situations, affections, states of mind of delicate complexity. Let the pixels of the screen conjure as much as they like: they will not be able to overwhelm the impression of a transfiguring, Byzantine light that takes your subjects away from the anonymity of the present, transporting them to another dimension. In a world of dreams, in a comic book, in a lost and distant paradise? Perhaps, especially in early watercolors and early drawings. However, it seems to me that, with the passage of time, light has lost in transcendence and gained in humanity. It is no longer a light projected from above and fully onto things. It is a light that radiates from things, an inner light that, for just an instant, makes visible the eternal vibration of reclining the head or extending one's hand. Of course, every effect has its price. The toll to be paid to reality for it to reveal itself is the strangled song: the concealment of faces, the denial of close-ups and whole figures, the shattering into several parts of the same image. Others stud their webs with dead, injured animals, and dumpsters; this is enough for you - and who knows that in a happy tomorrow this won't help either - to show us that nothing, not even a gesture, is meaningless, everything is soul.

Andrea Guastella, curator

Shades in pencil

Born in Modena forty-three years ago, Cristina Iotti works in pencil on paper with an exceptional technique. Originality of setting and great sense of balance distinguish her work. Therefore, for the first time in the history of the award, she wins the Gold Plate for graphics for the second year in a row, with "Sleeping Beauty on the train".

From ARTE Mondadori N. 423 – Nov. 2008 – ARTE 2008 award winners article (p. magazine)

But how long is the road to success- Ten young artists confess their hopes, disappointments, triumphs and defeats of the first steps in the art world Cristina Iotti Modenese, forty-three years old, began to consider herself an artist relatively late. She graduated from the European Institute of Design and worked for some time in the ceramics sector. Then, at thirty-seven, the sudden decision to turn her passion for colored pencils into a full-time profession. "Since I didn't know anyone in the industry, anyone who could give me tips, I started from the bottom rung" she says "starting to exhibit on the streets of my city". She was noticed there and so she moved on to small local group shows, in the meantime she sifted through competitions and traveled on the net, which for many young people is proving to be the best platform for making herself known to the greatest number of people. Last year, her participation in the ARTE Prize, where she earned the Gold Plate for graphics and the Faber-Castell prize, opened up a totally unexpected path for her. The work exhibited at the Permanente is noticed by the two architects in charge of selecting the artists who will decorate the new Costa cruise ship. The signing of the contract is almost immediate and now Cristina Iotti is working at a brisk pace (“few can understand how much time and how much effort goes into a job like mine…”, she says) because the Costa Luminosa will set sail in June 2009 with 18 of his drawings, together with the works of about fifteen other artists, placed in the suites and in the common areas.

Alessandra Redaelli From ARTE Mondadori No. 420 – August 2008 (p. magazine)

YOUNG BLOOD Annual of Italian talents awarded in the world IRON Editore pag 294-295 (catalog page)

Faceless Portrait Gallery- Cristina Iotti's girls. Stolen photos in pencil on paper

With her clear work, without smudging, Cristina Iotti (Modena, 1965) won the Targa d'oro for graphics and the special Faber-Castell prize at the last ARTE Prize. Since then, the attention of the galleries has been focusing on her. What pleases is the calm voice of the pencil on paper, which is expressed in small works where the protagonists are only women. Against undefined backgrounds, sometimes simply empty and white, the figure is seen from the back, as in a stolen photo. The investigation proceeds in detail, with attention focused from time to time on the texture of the hair or on the fabric of the dress and leaves other details to the imagination. Today she is on display in Milan, at the Entroterra gallery. The collective, entitled Italian hinterland, until 30 June takes stock of the work of the association which has been dedicated to the promotion of figurative art for five years.

Alessandra Redaelli Column "Work in progress" - ARTE Mondadori n. 417 May 2008 (p. magazine)

Cristina Iotti – life with a brush- Monthly interview IL Sassolino February 2008 by Laura Corallo http://www.ilsassolino.net/content/view/172/49/

…And isn't it perhaps the same love for detail that leads Cristina Iotti to elevate the colored pencil to the only means of expression and with that to catalog urban glimpses and female figures? A patient and meticulous work for a very modern result with a photographic flavour.

Alessandra Redaelli From presentation in the catalog of the collective exhibition “Italian Hinterland” – Galleria Entroterra, Milan April – June 2008 (catalog)

Awarded Cristina Iotti – Gazette of Modena - Sassuolo section page 12 – 24 December 2007 (p. quotidian)

Spring at the tip of a pencil

Delicate trait and meticulous attention to detail are the most evident characteristics of "With spring in the soul", by the forty-two-year-old Modena-born Cristina Iotti. But in this pencil on paper applied to wood, and then finished with wax, there is much more. Like the surprising shape of the diptych, the decision to relegate the subject to the left half of the picture and the extremely sophisticated sense of colour.

From ARTE Mondadori N. 411 – Nov.- 2007 ARTE2007 Award winners article (p. magazine)

…The latest season, i.e. that of 2007, seems to focus once again on attention to detail where the figuration (seen almost from the back) which leaves room for wisdom, the unbridled virtuosity of the details, the transience of the steps marked out in our daily life…

VALERIA S.LOMBARDI Dr. historian of contemporary art

The common people of Cristina Iotti

Cristina Iotti's "Ordinary People" at the L'Artificio di Sassuolo Association takes on hyper-real aspects. About fifteen works that explore man in everyday attitudes. An investigation that focuses not on the face, but on the details that the artist from Sassuolo identifies in elaborate images, with singular cuts to then proceed meticulously to the creation of the work with oil paints or colored pencils.

Michele Fuoco (art critic) Taken from the Gazzetta di Modena of 5 April 2007 Presentation of the exhibition “Ordinary People” – L’Artificio, Sassuolo (MO) ( p. quotidian)

Cristina Iotti in the Saxart review – Monthly "Il Sassolino" No. 21 March 2007 (p. magazine)

Women Artists get all dolled up for the Barbie Picture Show

Cristina Iotti takes a more dispassionate view of the phenomenon in her drawing in ink and pastel on paper “Real woman is not like Barbie”. In a meticulous photorealist technique, Iotti juxtaposes close-ups of a nude Barbie’s smiling face, nippleless breasts, and other body parts with those of a classically plump nude from art history, arranged in the squares of a grid. While Barbie meets today’s standards for slenderness, her plastic body, complete with strange seams between her moving parts, contrasts coldly with the warm curves of the classical nude, suggesting that this mechanical bride of modern consumerism may not be all that desirable after all.

Ed McCormack Gallery&Studio Magazine June/July/August 2006 Presentazione mostra collettiva “The Barbie Picture Show”-CVB Space, New York, 2006

It is a language of order and perfection of photographic cut, what Cristina Iotti manifests in her works.. Her "hyperrealism" concerns not only objects found in the house, but also external environments (park, city with skyscrapers), with the careful chromatic and formal choice, the meticulous precision of someone who has a sure conscience of things…

Michele Fuoco (art critic) Taken from the Gazzetta di Modena of 23 March 2004 Presentation of the exhibition "Fragments of reality" - Club Europa 92-Modena

The painting by Cristina Iotti on display at the Modern Art Gallery of Sassuolo is based on a lenticular realism. Iotti's compositions made of lemons, flowers and fruits (plate with walnuts and green apples, fruit bowl with grapes, three persimmons) assert themselves with a vivacity of colors and a perfection of elements that make them almost palpable. A punctual work that capitalizes on the artist's experience gained in graphic studies, designing sketches for ceramics and knitwear.

Michele Fuoco (art critic) taken from the Gazzetta di Modena of 15 November 2002 presentation of the exhibition "Rediscovered Atmospheres" - Modern Art Gallery - Sassuolo (MO)

“Freshness that gives light”

Yet in the compositions of the painter Cristina Iotti there is no air of seventeenth-century still leven: nothing of illusionistic and magniloquent effects, nothing of stylistic options of European and Italian pictorial currents, nothing profoundly expressive of naturalistic reality. In Cristina Iotti's works what stands out is the freshness, and this freshness gives light to her fruits and perfume to her flowers. I look at the compositions of this artist and I see them full of vitality, without the moralizing content of pietistic and ephemeral vanitas, dear to Lombard realists and seventeenth-century European schools. In the artist's accurate compositions, which recall the trompe-l'oeil effect of Baschenis' still lifes, what immediately catches our attention is the total lack of conceptual rarefaction and sumptuousness. In these compositions there is an ability to orchestrate the effects of light and matter, poised between classicism and realism, which transmits to the observer a balanced chromatic range of the whole and a right dose of color in the harmonic composure of each What. And this also when the artist tackles new themes. It is precisely in the balanced chromaticism and in the contained strength of color that Cristina Iotti stands out, remaining outside the fashions of all times. The painter's compositions can now be admired at the "La Telaccia" art gallery. And it is significant to participate in their vision, to know how much a meditative and balanced artist like Cristina Iotti can convey a desire for freshness and eloquence of harmony.

Enzo Schiavi (art critic) from the presentation of the exhibition at the Galleria La Telaccia – Turin – 2002