Patrizio di Massimo
Son of a Witch
ChertLüdde, Berlin
2 May – 26 July 2025

The following text was written by curator and writer Sara Giannini in the Spring of 2025 to accompany the exhibition, Son of a Witch.

–

I began writing this text in Civitanova Marche, a small town on the Adriatic Sea, in the center of the Italian peninsula, where both Patrizio and I spent our childhoods. It is there that we have been son and daughter to our mothers, struggling to find our own way in the world, learning to savor our own words, tones, and roles. It is there that we got ready for other shores, convinced we could escape this place and who we were supposed to become. What we did not know during those sultry nights spent together as rebellious teenagers—breathing the salty air of our town, dreaming big while gazing at the stars—was that those children we once were would continue to evolve, morph, and transmute into beings we hadn’t yet known, but, in a way, always had. Many years have passed since those nights. Patrizio is now a painter in London, and I live in Amsterdam, having become a curator. A couple of months ago, Patrizio asked for my opinion on the title of his upcoming show at ChertLüdde Gallery in Berlin: Son of a Witch. This question reawakened our conversations and led to the creation of this text.

–

Son of a Witch brings together a new body of paintings that deepens themes of self-portraiture, spiritual affiliation, masculine identity, and matrilineal genealogy. Echoing the artist’s investigation into such acts of transmission, the exhibition is in itself an expansion of ideas first introduced in his earlier work Automatic Writing (2023), also featured in the show. In this large canvas, Patrizio depicts himself writing in an open notebook—or, rather, he is captured in the moment just before writing, as no visible words appear. With eyes closed and in intense meditation, he is surrounded by a group of mysteriosus creatures, painted in primary colors. Crowding the canvas with a curious and placid attitude, their bodies conjoin different iconographies. Angelic and satanic depictions in Christianity blend with alien imagery, while touching on both Asian and Greek-Roman mythologies. This combinatory approach is reinforced by the distinct presence of the three primary colors, foundational essences capable of generating the full spectrum of hues. The intentional use of primary colors extends beyond the canvas: the exhibition’s walls, alternating red, blue, and yellow continue this color system, mirroring the work’s attention to the spiritual dynamics of generation, genealogy, and composition. When contemplating the title of this piece—Automatic Writing—one wonders: are these inner demons or spirit messengers from another realm?

Automatic writing refers to the possibility to write words outside of rational control. Used by the Surrealists as a method to let the unconscious speak without the influence of the ego, it has been employed throughout history and across cultures as a means for spiritual entities to communicate with humans. In this canvas, Patrizio is caught in the act of receiving energy and perceived words. As with many of his paintings, this imaginative scene also carries a personal, biographical layer. When Patrizio shared the title of the exhibition with me, Son of a Witch, he explained that it directly referred to his layered relationship with his mother, who began practicing a related technique, known as Inspired Writing, nearly three decades ago. Throughout her spiritual journey, Patrizio has been both a constant interlocutor and a frequent recipient of her sessions. Moreover, as his mother refined her skills, Patrizio began his own experiments with this inherited form of channeling. Several notebooks with his writings can be seen in the exhibition, serving as an expansion and accompaniment to the paintings.

As feminist theorists have shown, women have long been persecuted for their presumed ability to channel otherworldly powers. The female body, with its hollow, chthonic, reproductive organ, has historically symbolized volatility, hysteria, and irrationality in Western thought and medical history. As Silvia Federici and others have pointed out, the fear of the untamable woman and the mass killing of women through witch-hunts helped establish the capitalist/colonial world order. It’s no surprise, then, that the ‘witch’ archetype, with its multifaceted meanings, has been powerfully reclaimed by feminist movements since at least first wave feminism. “Tremate, tremate, le streghe son tornate!” (Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned) became a famous Italian feminist slogan in the 1970s.

What does it mean, therefore, to be the son of a witch today? How does a matrilineal lineage shape the mother-son relationship? What kinds of transmissions are possible through the fractures of time and the political disjuncture of gender identities? The paintings in Son of  a Witch are not only a recognition of personal destiny within a bloodline, but also an exploration of political, affective, and energetic kinship. They suggest a relationship to a long history of violence, struggle, and potentiality, where the ‘mother-witch’ serves as a matrix for opening up to an elsewhere, presenting the possibility of being, doing, and sensing otherwise. After years of reimagining his own identity through the lens of masculinity and Italian cultural history, Patrizio returns to the questions: “Who am I? Where do I come from?”—but now, with a shift in focus. In this exhibition, the ‘I’ is both personal and collective, individual yet multiple. By learning from the ‘mother-witch’, the artist opens himself to receiving, hosting, and possibly transforming. It is thus through this lens of hospitality, opening, and channeling that I invite the viewer to approach the works in the exhibition, where self-portraiture is less about staging the self and more about perforating it—creating holes through which identities can flow and transit. During channeling sessions, the transmitter’s body becomes hollow, a vessel—literally a medium—through which messages are passed on. The ego retracts to make space for other voices and knowledges. This process enacts the aporia of the absent present: while the body is there, it is stripped of its own identity.

In To Hear, not to Hear (2025), Patrizio uses his body to re-enact a photograph by British artist Helen Chadwick, Ruin (1986). Known for her feminist approach to the female body, Chadwick twists her naked body away from the viewer to hide her face, rejecting the objectification of the female nude in art history. Her other hand rests on a skull, a memento mori linking the body to inevitable decay and death. In Patrizio’s painted re-enactment, the scene is altered, acquiring an almost metaphysical quality. The background is filled with a thick red curtain, a theatrical element that frequently appears in Patrizio’s works. While Chadwick rejects the male gaze imposed on her body, Patrizio’s gesture suggests a different kind of refusal—one closer to an unsolvable, Hamletian doubt. In the present context, the skeleton resting on his legs appears almost as a symbol of the widespread destruction and looming ruins of our time. What are the monsters the artist has summoned but cannot bear to face? And where are they? If in Automatic Writing the monsters are confined to the canvas, here they exist beyond it—surrounding us. The artist’s inability to look directly at them compels the viewer to confront an unsettling truth: the unbearable is already here, standing beside us. The question is: What will we do about it?

Dad of a Witch (2025) is instead a d’après of Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, a work attributed to Baroque painter Orazio Gentileschi, and possibly realized in collaboration with his daughter Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the few professional female artists of the time. The scene is based on the Biblical story of Judith, who seduces, intoxicates, and kills the Assyrian general Holofernes to protect her people. A popular theme in the ‘Power of Women’ genre in Medieval and Renaissance art, this episode provided artists with a pretext to explore gender roles—though not always from a proto-feminist standpoint, but rather to affirm, through inversion, the misogynist fear of female domination. In the 20th century, especially in Artemisia’s more explicit depiction of Judith slaying the general, this work has been reinterpreted through a feminist lens. In Patrizio’s rendering, the scene is distilled, almost abstracted. Judith and her servant have vanished, leaving only Holofernes’ decapitated head, cradled by a dynamic gold-yellow drapery. The same drapery materializes in the exhibition space, suggesting, as often in Patrizio’s work, that what can be seen as ornamentation holds in fact both semiotic and spiritual significance. Here, the fabric echoes the aesthetic and philosophical role of the fold in Baroque art. Following Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation, the Baroque fold, with its smooth curves and infinite pleats, is not to be mistaken with an artistic whim, as it is a representation of the universe as a continuous, vertiginous twisting of matter and soul. In Patrizio’s painting, it is more than a background; it’s an active, enveloping force that elevates the severed head to a transcendent dimension.

In its metaphysical isolation, the head carries the marks of a specific iconography within Catholicism, Baroque aesthetics, and Western visual culture at large. Caught between pleasure and pain, the eyes and mouth of the figure remain open, expressing an ecstatic rapture. From the Ancient Greek ekstasis, meaning to stand outside oneself, ecstasy signifies a deep communion with the divine. This mystical experience is often articulated in terms of a penetration and perforation of the wholeness of the human body by the power of God. Such submissive condition has granted ecstasy a feminizing connotation implying passivity, lack of autonomy, receptivity, and radical openness. It is therefore not surprising, that throughout Christianity, ecstasy has mostly been a women’s affair and a radical experience of feminization when happening to male subjects. Its most frequent depictions in art history follows a stereotypical representation of female orgasm: arched back, tilted head, remissive postures, agape mouth, and ajar eyes. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s baroque sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is almost a paradigmatic example of this experience. Captured in the instants before an angel pierces her heart with an arrow, Saint Theresa is reclined in an orgasmic posture, as her robe folds and drapes infinitely all around her. Patrizio’s Holofernes is dramatically transfigured by Saint Theresa’s lingering apparition.

In their flight from the self, ecstatic subjects are characterized by a lack of cohesion and the inability to regulate and contain the self. Ecstasy’s ‘leaking’ condition, like the witch’s unfathomable powers, became foundational to the 19th-century invention of hysteria as a neurological pathology by French doctor Jean-Martin Charcot and later, as a psychoanalytical disorder by Sigmund Freud, who recognized Charcot as his mentor and forerunner. For Charcot, the iconography of ecstasy literally became a visual glossary for symptoms of hysteria, with the ecstatic women of history offering proof of the natural hysterics within them. As a testament to the pervasive influence of this line of thinking, Freud notoriously hung a lithography of A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887) over the couch in his studio. The painting represents Charcot delivering a clinical lecture and demonstration at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris with one of his ‘hysteric’ patients replicating Saint Theresa’s ecstasy. From this perspective, Patrizio’s head, then, becomes a palimpsestic vessel, which intervenes in the gender performativity of the historical subject. Holofernes, beheaded by a woman, is further feminized by its association with Saint Theresa’s ecstatic submission, questioning the far-reaching implications of this iconography for women and feminized political subjects.

The image of the open mouth resurfaces in POV (Blue Ladybug, Amulet) (2025). This miniature painting zooms in on the artist’s mouth, wide open, with his tongue sticking out as a blue ladybug visits him. This insect, which has already appeared in Patrizio’s self-portraiture, symbolizes happiness, luck, and protection. The small size of the work, combined with the symbolism of the ladybug, imbues the series with an amulet-like function. While earlier paintings featured the ladybug resting on the artist’s forehead or cheek, in this piece, the insect’s presence in the mouth complicates the power dynamic between the two. Did he open his mouth to catch it? Will the ladybug be swallowed? Conversely, the ladybug is an uncanny presence in the mouth. As long as it remains, it exerts its own spell on Patrizio: no words can be articulated, turning the emitter into a receiver. The shift in roles—between emission and reception, activity and passivity, male and female—also manifests in the painting’s title, POV, which stands for ‘Point of View’. The acronym alludes to a trend on social media where videos externalize the creator’s inner perspective, and, ultimately, the viewer’s own. In this painting, a mise en abyme occurs: the artist’s POV is objectified in a painted version of himself, depicted in a state of reception. This amulet-like painting then almost serves as a key cipher for the exhibition, encapsulating the gesture of opening, receiving, and channeling that permeates the paintings, as well as the automatic writing that accompanies them.

Medieval monks believed that taste and knowledge were deeply intertwined, which is why they would ruminate on sacred scriptures—murmuring, chewing, and savoring words as a way to absorb them. This connection endures in the Italian language, where sapere means knowledge, and sapore means taste. In this light, what would a blue ladybug taste like, and what wisdom would it carry? Perhaps it is through this tiny, symbolic creature that the wisdom of the mother-witch finds its most delicate expression. The son of a witch must ask not only how to receive this inheritance but how to truly taste it—how to chew, swallow, and ultimately become the ladybug whose blue hue emerges from an elsewhere.

References:
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Translated by Tom Conley. University of Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1992.
George Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
Silva Federici, Caliban and The Witch. Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation, New York City: Autonomedia, 2004.
Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy. Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Translated by Gillian Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Photo by Marjorie Brunet Plaza