Sharareh Shimi
Il Mundus Imaginalis
10 – 31 luglio 2025
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Sharareh Shimi’s “mundus imaginalis” takes shape and form in the spaces of the Carisal Foundation in Salerno, with a series of ceramic works—some recent and others created specifically for the occasion—strongly connected to the artist’s memory and Middle Eastern culture. But that’s not all. Taking on the role of the itinerant, nomadic artist, a role shared by many artists from countries of a distant East, still little known to us Westerners, Shimi draws on the themes and expressive techniques of our genius loci—he gained experience with Monica Amendola, a brilliant and skilled ceramist from the “Vasai di Cetara” group founded by Ugo Marano, and grew up with Ogliara, Rufoli, and his terracotta—to offer often illuminating and disturbing visions of his and our world, now inextricably and disharmoniously intertwined. Despite the crucial encounter between different cultures for the development of his research, the ceramic works on display lead us to engage with a reverie that draws on Middle Eastern memory and culture, particularly the Zoroastrian religion of ancient Persia. All this moves his imagination toward the creation of a true “imaginal world,” an intermediary world that connects the sensible with the intelligible, time with eternity, molded in terracotta and inhabited by anthropomorphic figures, surreal landscapes, metamorphic forms, angels of good and evil, and mythological creatures. Iconographic motifs that, without ever abandoning his magical and alchemical realism, typical of his culture’s way of expressing himself through allegories and metaphors, give rise to a poetic yet restless form of symbolism.