Intra-seeing is a specific quality of seeing, denoting an indistinct, hazy perception. This word brings us back to the intuition that permeates the artist Maria Fradinho's gradual discovery of the city. A discovery made gradually, step by step, looking, smelling, slowly penetrating and merging into the giant urban body, through which her body ventures. Walking, like traveling, has long been part of Fradinho's artistic practice.

The gaze of the passerby differs from that of the walker who decides, even for a period, to live: it expresses a need to go deeper, well beyond the surface that allows us to perceive a fleeting glance.

And it is in this way that, now, Maria Fradinho walks through Rome: looking, seeing and intra-seeing, beginning to discern what is less visible at first glance, not yet within her reach, but already perceptible. A discovery that is no longer just a "visiting", but already a desire to take possession and belong. Or a desire to be inhabited, in turn.

Maria Fradinho lets herself be inhabited: by the warm, daytime and nighttime light of Rome; by its noises, its ruins, its history. Perhaps it is this desire, which in some way is also possession, that drives her to collect, near the ruin of the aqueduct, a stone: perhaps a ruin itself.

A ruin that, in another time, transferred water - life - from one place to another. And it is precisely this idea of transfer that becomes the fulcrum in these new works by Fradinho, who transfers ideas, sensations, glances, contacts: from water to stone, from stone to charcoal, to graphite, to paper, from intra-seeing to the hand, and, again, to water and, finally, again, to paper.

The liquid transfer from one place to another brings us back to the fluidity of the traveler's existence, who adapts to the places he passes through like water to the riverbed. It is no coincidence, therefore, that water now takes on a new weight: in these drawings it becomes a substance, no longer a simple medium. The memory of the water no longer present, but whose sign remains in the stones that remain of the aqueduct, joins the memory of the water left by the pigment, spread by it on the sheet: water that, here, becomes light. The warm, daytime and nighttime light that constantly accompanies Fradinho's urban walks.

The artist, like water, carries within her these sensations, these new memories, and, through that collected stone, a synthesis of the city's history and life, transformed into an extension of her body, pours them onto the paper in the elaboration of some of the multiple stratifications that become drawing, and that make the drawing, at each passage, increasingly mineral.The drawing thus ends up becoming the mnemonic snapshot of the physical and sensual contact between the artist's body-mind, a present and historical, living body, of the city of Rome.

Helena Valsecchi