Twenty - four pastels, twenty - four lines, twenty - four hours, so Giulia Napoleone discloses the mystery of daytime, she recalls a bright mirage, she creates a relation between the word and the images alphabet: the occasion is an exceptional eighteenth - century text, that includes Gerusalemme liberata's parts where Tasso described daylight's variations; from « L'alba lieta rideva » to « et anco il Ciel d'alcuna stella adorno » , the hours change and colors change too, gray and deep, cold blue replace light blue and pink tones.

I meet the artist in the gallery Il Bulino, where the whole cycle Al mutar dell'ora is exposed, we speak about the pastels, about nature and memory's images, about time like a cyclic form and eternal come back: every drawing can be inserted in a wider context, the collection, like a single organism, is the starting point and the landing - place to a reading of artist'work, method, poetic and lyrical purpose.

The exhibition can be read like a book, it is one of the many little book that Giulia Napoleone creates for herself, attending to every detail, she decides to show this more intimate side of her work, revealing a courageous consinstency. It is a sort of diary, a cryptography, we must not find its secret, but we can feel its poetry, its experience, its pain and after its placid conscience.

The epigraph is full of sorrow : « Since then, at an uncertain hour, / Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta / Quella pena ritorna. » (Primo Levi). After that moment, which brings ourself to know pain, there is the certainty that sorrow will come back: it is impossible to determine the "when", but that uncertain hour is an appointment, it is like a sound, which presages, something deeply rooted, which moves us. The artist does not say what is her "Since then ...", but everyone can replace one's experience.

This "uncertain" sign is the creative process: Giulia Napoleone calls it "assiduous uncertainty", it is a mind's formed image that, sooner or later, will take shape.
The drawing appears slowly, from the superimposition of glazing, from the gather or the rarefy of the lines and the points, her technique is not sterile virtuosity , but it is awareness; the pastel's point becomes like a punch (it is one of the engraving's technique that the artist prefers) when it traces the forms or it gradates the tones; every work births form this slow love, from this progressive approach: «They follow me everywhere during my travels» says the artist, telling an intimate and daily dimension of the creative act.
She chooses a soft passage from the brightness to the shades, she doses the effect, keeping the imagine's freshness and disclosing its lenght in time.

The formal problem is fundamental in Giulia Napoleone's work: the most complicated moment of her creative course is to define the form and to place it in the sheet's space; in some pastels the coloured surface coincides with the whole sheet, « it is a sort of barbaric horror vacui » explains the artist, there is not a distinction between closed and opened shapes: we do not read an interruption where the colour frays out in the white sheet, but there is the intersection, the joint with the white shape defined by the background.

It is a study on the colour and the pure brightness, on the perception of positive - negative. The pastel l'ombra homai fatta più tacita e bruna is very interesting for cromatic and formal solution: the joint between the "peninsula" of dark gray shade and the sheet was seeming to turn into a clearer gradation, (we can see a light glazing on the left), then the artist chose to leave the white sheet, so the passage became evident, plastic, it is not shape + background, but shape + shape.

Giulia Napoleone loves the cold tones, grays and the vast blue and azure's range; in the pastel mezzo dì, a thin red line divides the blue field from the green field, it is like an hurt, it is a painful moment, an hour of sorrow, which keeps a sensation of certainty, of eternal come back. So in the pastel celesti campi, the white line is a sign, a premonition of what is preparing: midday, the zenith's painful light when l'aria par di faville tutto avvampi. The circular movement, the violet sparks are the culminating moment of the daily revelation, a foreseen explosion, which will be repeated, like a periodic movement's point.

The evening has the form of a cobweb: thin threads, like vegetable venations, a delicate grid; the gloaming's last light was extinguished, it is an uncertain moment, full of melancholy astonishment; the lines' secret geometry traces hidden movement: gray fades into blue in a passage of held tension, of dilatation.
Giulia Napoleone has not interest in the representation of human figure, she prefers the natural elements, she loves the water for its changeability: it can assume any form, however it remains unspoilt, it is always the same, but it is never equal; the surface's movement attracts the artist: the azure transparency and the shining rays create an amazing play of reflections.

She does not work en plein air, but she always sees with curiosity, she memorizes the forms, she combines the emotions in an inner journey that flows into a creative thought; since that moment the imagine exists and, "at uncertain hour", it will form on the sheet, inevitably.