Adrienne Lee and the resonance/retentissement of places
The “You and I” series | Translated from IT
May 22, 2026
By Marco Eugenio Di Giandomenico

“You and I (Assisi)” is the title of Adrienne Lee’s work, created using mixed media (acrylic, Korean hanji mulberry paper; a Korean fabric traditionally used for hanbok garments) on unstretched cotton canvas, which becomes a site-specific installation at the Oratory of Santa Chiarella in Assisi (Perugia), from the 20^th to 30^th of May 2026.

main installation view of <You and I (Assisi)>
photography by Richard Gaston

The work inaugurates the “You and I” series, a cycle of works inspired by specific places, whose distinctive landscapes and historiographical, cultural, and artistic identities become recurring creative and expressive leitmotifs. Assisi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the birthplace of St. Francis and St. Clare, is the first location chosen by Lee. The Oratory of Santa Chiarella (Parish of San Rufino, Diocese of Assisi–Nocera Umbra–Gualdo Tadino) becomes the exhibition setting for a work that acts, so to speak, as an “antenna”: resting on the paved floor of the nave beneath the vault and thus ideally oriented towards the sky, it establishes and conveys an intense aesthetic dialogue not only with the Oratory’s fourteenth-century frescoes, but also with the artistic, monumental, and landscape heritage of the wider region.

Hence the colour palette employed, ranging from chalky magenta and Giotto’s ultramarine blue – derived from lapis lazuli – to ochre earth tones.

The “You and I” series does not mark a departure from the artist’s previous work; rather, it represents a compelling and sustainable development of it – an expressive externalisation of research into the mysterious mechanisms governing human neurological processes in relation to the natural and cosmic forces of which they constitute only a partial revelation: one of the many perceptible facets of a universal principle (Platonic essences, Divine Providence, Kant’s a priori categories, and so forth) that exists beyond time and space. In this context, the artistic, geographical, and social landscape of a territory, together with its perpetual transformations, reveals the action of the Transcendent, much as neuroscience investigates the mechanisms of the human brain and nervous system. What emerges is an awareness of a kind of unified demiurgic matrix, whose intimate resonance Lee captures, becoming the voice of her own “chaos-germ” or “creative diagram”, to borrow Francis Bacon’s expression.

In the work installed in Assisi, we witness the dissolution of all resemblance: the pre-pictorial inspiration evoking the spiritual and secular Franciscan world gives way to an inner chaos in which the imaginative visions of Lee’s existential and cultural heritage coexist with appeals to safeguard the socio-cultural identity of places – their karma shaped by millennia of human and natural history – alongside explorations of the scientific intricacies of the synaptic connections between neurons and other cells of the human body that underlie brain activity, learning, and memory.

From this chaos emerges the so-called pictorial fact: an abstract artistic expression in which the diagram is reduced to a minimum and an original, compelling pictorial language takes over, characterised by slanting strokes arranged in horizontal sequence, evoking both the marks of ancient Korean calligraphy and the anatomy of neurons or the form of tree roots, within a chromatic explosion that allows the various pictorial planes to remain in balance – as Paul Cézanne might have said.

The code serves an important message of values: to recreate a spiritual life for contemporary man, who has forgotten his origins and the meaning of his existence, obsessed with the ceaseless development of new technologies, which, from being tools for improving the quality of life, become the very object of human desire, the chimera of an ephemeral eternity, the pillars of a ‘society of transparency’ – as Byung-Chul Han would say – in which only consent (like/don’t like/dislike) counts, however obtained, regardless of the content in question.

installation view of <You and I (Assisi)>
photography by Richard Gaston

In the series “You and I”, Lee advocates direct contact with space, which is an essential element in the construction of human identity. Reconnecting with the “spirit of the place”, that is to say its natural or human history, becomes an imperative that is not only aesthetic but also ethical.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who has always been interested in understanding reality through poetry, defines the poetic image as a sort of flash of inspiration capable of producing a retentissement, thus striking the unconscious with a “resonance of essence”. In other words, he recognises a phenomenological character in poetry because it is capable of taking hold of the observer (or the reader), of making them resonate with it in an unexpected, inexplicable and therefore non-rational way.

Bachelard uses the word retentissement to denote the idea of identification, or rather a “direct participation in the life of the image”. The image reverberates within us with a living voice, and we are overwhelmed and permeated by its echo, as though we ourselves were a vast cavern. The term should not be translated as “resonance”, to which Bachelard assigns a meaning antithetical to the echoing of the image, since it refers instead to the reawakening of memories drawn from our lived experience, which the poetic image may in turn evoke.

In resonance, it is not the image that is relived: the image represents merely the beginning of a journey oriented towards psychological subjectivity, which has in fact been formed through the contingencies of lived experience. In resonance, it is precisely these contingencies that are evoked. At the same time, the more the reader immerses themselves in the recollection of their own past experience, the further they distance themselves and become distracted from the image.

Bachelard effectively states that ‘One does not read a poem whilst thinking of something else’.

In retentissement, we remain with the poem; whereas we read the poem whilst thinking of something else if the poem merely evokes sentimental ‘resonances’ of our past. In resonance, specific events are evoked, whilst in retentissement we move within the realm of imaginative values.

In The Poetics of Space (1957), Bachelard speaks of the existence of “praised spaces”, namely places capable of generating a sense of “participation”, allowing those who experience them to enter into resonance with them.

“Our purpose,” writes the French philosopher, “is to examine very simple images, the images of happy space. From this perspective, our research deserves the name of topophilia, insofar as it seeks to determine the human value of spaces of possession, of spaces defended against adverse forces, of loved spaces. For often very different reasons, and with all the variations implied by poetic nuance, these are praised spaces. To their protective value – which may be positive – are linked imagined values, which soon become dominant values. The space grasped by the imagination cannot remain an indifferent space, left to the measurements and calculations of the surveyor: it is lived space, experienced not only in its positivity, but through all the partialities of the imagination. Indeed, it is almost always endowed with powers of attraction; it concentrates being within protective boundaries. The dialectics of outside and intimacy are therefore not a balanced game in the realm of images”.

installation view of <You and I (Assisi)>
photography by Richard Gaston

For Lee, it is art that teaches us how to seek out such spaces and recognise their mystery. In these terms, aesthetic experience must assume the form of an exploratory journey, becoming an alternative to an egocentric, limiting, and distorting view of reality. Consequently, both the image and the role of the artist must recover a responsibility that is at once social and spiritual. Having long been alienated from reality, the artist must once again learn to speak to the world without fear of simultaneously assuming the roles of jester, poet, and king of fools. Their primary task must be to confer meaning upon what appears trivial, revealing elements of spirituality within the ordinary. The artist must seek and discover a balance between the irrational and the rational. To do so, they must move beyond every form of limitation and navigate freely through science, philosophy, and theology. In the aforementioned sense, the image constitutes the source of creativity itself. It arises from an encounter with physical space and becomes a work of art the moment the artist succeeds in expressing it aesthetically, through their own visual language, within the very space from which the retentissement originates.

Lee’s creativity springs from a pure and authentic inner imaginative flow generated through her encounter with the locus: a kind of light that reveals the most intimate identity of place, the primordial magma of an artistic narrative devoted to preserving the virginity of space, whose integrity – intolerant of any destructive human intervention – constitutes the necessary condition for the only possible form of human habitation on the planet across successive generations.

The resonance and retentissement of Assisi inhabit Lee’s art, rendering it profoundly edifying for the contemporary viewer.

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Marco Eugenio Di Giandomenico
(Contemporary Art Critic, Lecturer in Art Criticism at the CP of the University of Milan)