10 May-16 June 2006. Needles, thread, pins and paint are some of the materials used by artist Primarosa Cesarini Sforza in the creation of her work.

Trame. Primarosa Cesarini Sforza. Until 31 June. With unflinching clarity Primarosa now knows she does not need the traditional stuff of art: you can make it with anything, you can scoop it from the richness of daily life. You can make a line with needle and thread or a row of pins you can use swelling stuffed cloth like pin-cushions, or smoothed candle-wax or old school maps or fresh Fabriano as ground. You can use anything appetizing around you and suspend it in large boxes of glass or in square or oval little ones, rows and rows of them and make all those images like toyfull specimens gleam and hum around us.

When in the 1970s I came upon one of this Roman cosmopolitan artists box assemblage in the Allan Stone gallery in New York, I was astounded. It was a torn-up sardine can full of fluttering butterfly pasta a witty study of contrasting texture. Then in the Ariete gallery in Rome Primarosa used big stressed sheets of tarpaulin, ornamented and punctuated with charcoal line and pigeon feathers, hung up by punched-metal eyelets, years before Rauschenberg used tarpaulin.

Primarosas images always were simple: little houses with chimneys, chimneys and smoke stacks, spouting volcanoes, little girls in aprons, the silhouettes, the ideas, the symbols of these. And now there are lots of cockle-shells too, accented with daubs of paint from an open-fingered hand, lacy sprigs of herbs, Athenas olive branch, ruddy pomegranates, piles of breakfast cups, the map of Italy. Thee is a beckoning of ordinary things made magic around us. A wise hand has busily and kindly made picture-books and fables to soothe us in our stark world. Galleria Giulia, Via della Barchetta 13, tel. 066861443.

Edith Schloss