The scientific definition of a drop in the dictionary reads as follows: A drop is a small volume of liquid, completely or almost completely confined by free surfaces. A very small quantity of liquid, roundish in shape, which is detached from the mass of the liquid itself or formed by the slow aggregation of smaller particles that collect on a surface. In the collective imagination and unconscious, in art, it represents and emphasizes the fertility and impetuosity of rain, the gushing of blood from a wound, the dripping sweat of fatigue, the humors of eros, and the sound and rhythm of the repetitive and inexorable gushing of time.

In Allegra Hicks’ work, the drop is reiterated as a symbol but also as a material and tangible reconstruction of the fluidity and continuous transformation of things and existence, of the fragility of human relationships, to quote Zygmunt Bauman’s famous essay, Liquid Love. Like an alchemist, the artist blends drawings and materials, colors and objects into a unicum, which emerges as something new and deliberately not ascribable to a precise definition, just like a liquid substance in appearance and intentions, even when it is solid.

In this installation for the Misericordiella church, Allegra Hicks continues her original reinterpretation of Neapolitan imagery. No city in the world, perhaps, manages to exude so relentlessly the vital energy that distinguishes it, as if all the contradictions of humanity were coming to the surface, through its magma of history and contemporaneity, of voices and noises, of sea and cement, of sky and strong smells, of light and tactility. And of colors, those colors that Sonia Delaunay called the skin of the world, covering paintings and clothes, fabrics and cars.

A large red drop oozes into the crypt, standing out impetuously among the ruins of this architecture stratified in an indefinable time and space. Red, in all its nuances, from the bright red of freshly drawn blood to the dark red of dried blood, coagulates on the stone like a shower of tears, of ampoules, participating in the collective imagery of the Blood of St. Gennaro, expanding on its universal symbolism. The color of the inside of the body, the color of eros and violence.

On the opposite side of the crypt, like a counterbalance of otherness, a large diaphanous and spectral drop that, like an Ascent to the Empyrean, attracts the spectator’s gaze until it absorbs him, sucking him into an indefinable space eternally distant from the brutal and sensual fluidity and corporeity of liquids.