The time of flowering

Emma Talbot is 53 years old, lives in London and is an artist. Her works are on display at the Venice Arsenale, within the new Biennale Arte. In 2006, when she was 36, she lost her husband. When she tells it, her proud and present gaze becomes distant, absent, as if she were looking for a point on the horizon that she cannot find. Emma tells her that after the loss of her partner, she worked two jobs: during the day she taught in college and took care of the children. In the evening and
sometimes at night, however, she drew to get in touch with her husband. Essential lines, surreal worlds, watercolors of seven different shades and a lot of black: in each painting she created she didn’t care what she did, she just thought about reconnecting with her husband.

This number of Vanity Fair was born like Emma’s drawings: a way to rejoin dreams, to the imagination, to the wonder that these times of war and pandemic have taken away from us, at times forbidden. To do it, we have relied on the “greatest expert” on the subject at this time, Cecilia Alemani, the curator of the new Biennale Arte in Venice.
We could have limited ourselves to interviewing Cecilia or putting her on the cover, but it seemed too obvious, too banal. So, as happened in the past with great directors like Paolo Sorrentino or with great artists like Francesco Vezzoli, last December we asked Cecilia to direct Vanity Fair, to think of the newspaper as one of the pavilions of her Biennale, an editorial extension of her commitment as curator. Working with her, side by side, in recent months has been like lighting a lighthouse on the night of the war, like opening a breach in the fog left by the pandemic.

The stories of magic, dreams, transformation, metamorphosis, surrealism that you will find in the following pages work like a balm on wounds and like water in the desert. They are like an underground sap, an unexploded volcano, a sort of karst river that flows under our lives and that we have the task of bringing to the surface, to bring back to the surface.
To describe her loss, to make people understand the value of her drawings, Emma Talbot tells of how «going through a deep pain is sometimes necessary to activate a change. I do not wish it to anyone, I myself would have done without it, but I tell anyone who is now living in a complex situation that it is possible, in the end, to find meaning again. I have been bad, I have been resilient, now I am happy. This is the time of flowering ».

Here, I hope this artistic and surreal number of Vanity Fair let the beginning of the flowering time be for you. A time that requires us to open up to what we do not know, to experience one’s own transformations and those of others, to make room for uncertainty and uniqueness, to make room for art, magic, fantasy. It will seem strange to you, I know, these days.
Yet I am convinced of it: these dreams, these visions, are a way to rediscover meaning. And this journey, the journey of Cecilia, that of Emma, ​​that of Vanity, your journey, are the adventure that you must return to live. Hour after hour. Second after second. \

PS Special thanks to Sharon Stone, her usual courage, her wonderful recklessness. Thank you for choosing to be part of this unique project, of this magical madness called Vanity Fair.

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