There’s a geography of art that often doesn’t coincide with that of maps. Mary Cinque’s journey, from her roots in Campania to the horizons of Addis Ababa, from the liveliness of Milan to her sojourns in London and the United States, unfolds a cartography of her gaze, made up of people and places encountered in their daily lives, which has found its most authentic language in oil pastels.
Moreover, it often happens that the choice of a material defines what Luigi Pareyson calls “formative intention,” meaning that “the project of creating a work of art begins only when the formative intention is defined in the very act of adopting a material.”
This is precisely the case with Mary Cinque and her “discovery” of oil pastel, which occurred during her extended stay in London between 2017 and 2019.
What initially began as a practical necessity—the impossibility of having a studio large enough for her traditional painting—soon transformed into an opportunity. Oil pastel became the tool capable of reconciling the immediacy of drawing with the power of color, leading to what Matisse would have called a “plastic writing” capable of shaping “the light of the white sheet, without depriving it of its touching candor.”
In works such as Stoke Newington Church Street, On the Beach, At the Acropolis Museum, and Hydra Island, the white of the sheet becomes a luminous space in which the figures seem to emerge and dissolve.
Mary Cinque captures the moment and preserves it,restoring the freshness of gesture and the chromatic intensity of vision.
Her work oscillates between urban scenes and domestic glimpses, colorful markets and café corners—I’m thinking of The Espresso Room, London, Ravello Beach, and Feminism—figures captured in that suspended moment before the pose, before the gaze has yet to build its defenses, as can also be seen in portraits such as Shannon and Cathy in Spoleto.
Mary Cinque’s art can be seen as an art of silent observation, in which time expands and contracts according to the internal rhythms of the viewer and the viewed. Each pastel becomes a visual story, a fragment that opens onto a disarming truth: the experience of suspended time, that minimal instant that painting expands until it becomes a shared memory.
Her style is thus distinguished by a lightness that is not superficiality, but the ability to transform the everyday into a visual dance. We can recognize a gentle irony, a tenderness capable of discovering the poetic in the ordinary, as in Summertime or Passengers, High Line, New York, where the gaze lingers on minimal details, attracted by a color, a gesture, an object.
Maurizio Sciaccaluga would have included this figuration in the “soft line” founded on “freedom, irony, and linguistic inventiveness,” characterized by rarefied surfaces that seem to dissolve in the white light of the paper.
Mary Cinque’s pastels don’t describe, they evoke: they suggest spaces of contemplation in which the viewer can recognize fragments of their own experience transfigured into vision.
The artist, moreover, is not interested in reproducing a narrative of reality, although her observation often begins with photographic recordings. Like David Hockney, who sees painting as an extension of the gaze, for Mary Cinque, painting is a tool for engaging with reality and transforming it. If photography captures a moment, painting expands it, transforms it into vision. And it is in this gap—between observation and image, between reality and pictorial construction—that her research is situated.
Matisse’s words confirm this once again: “Composition is the art of decoratively arranging the various elements available to the painter to express his feelings,” creating an “architecture in which all the proportions are correct, although the figure depicted does not convey the impression of nature as it is properly seen.”
The perspective that opens up before Mary Cinque’s work is therefore that of a laboratory of gazes on the present: each pastel investigates and reveals, transforming the fleeting moment into poetic permanence. Her art is configured as an authentic “visual breath,” capable of restoring rhythm and depth to a world that seems to have lost the ability to pause.