The checkered cloth

In presenting the triptych of The Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus by Simone Martini, the scholar Gianfranco Contini, confessed his desire to secretly extract from the rich and lush composition of that painting a piece of the flashy checkered fabric lining the Angel’s mantle. These pages describe Isabella Ducrot’s meeting with that painting. Through the enigmatic edge of the Angel’s garment she reflects on that which is the first material of her work: the cloth.For many years Isabella Ducrot has painted and composed in many ways fabrics, textiles, Eastern prayer sashes, attempting each time to demonstrate in those textile structures a “breath”, which crosses and enlivens them. Images, memories and reflections that have stayed with her throughout her work as a painter, are here collected as in a freely composed collage. Isabella Ducrot has written in these pages a confession of poetics.Take any fabric, let it be linen, silk or wool. Stretch it more, against the light and you will be able to see the weft;the original architecture composed of crossing threads and of voids that represent the first object of inspiration toIsabella Ducrot. The fundamental intuition of the author is that human beings, in the contrived textiles that they havecreated and worn for millennia, haven’t done more than duplicating a structure original to the mind, that persists unaltered for millennia.