Since childhood we make the natural gesture of covering our face with our hands, to hide eyes filled with tears or to conceal sudden emotions that surface on our face even before they reach the heart. Covering the face is an effective way to prevent others from penetrating our innermost self, from unveiling what is ours alone, because the face is an open door onto the soul.

Our hands, then, are our first mask, and after them come the thousand masks of a personal repertoire we use to tell the story of who we are not, who we would like to be, or who we would never want to be.

In this choral exercise, each author has engaged with the symbolic theme of the mask; the result is an array of screens, more or less filtering, at times striking for the zoomorphic specters they evoke, at others delicate, enigmatic or hermetic.

It is a delight to imagine who lies hidden behind these masks, masterfully crafted by the highly skilled artisan Diego Moretti, who has been able to pour into each work his love for wood and for his native Sardinia — the mythical land of the most intense and authentic masks in the entire Mediterranean basin.