Elena’s Alphabet

Elena’s alphabet is a whim, an artistic whim. She succeeds in translating a system of graphic signs, in itself abstract, into visual representations with an immediate expressive impact, drawings in brilliant colours that draw on a collective, historical, familiar imagery – making us participants and accomplices – and at the same time an imagery that is personal and whimsical, which enchants us and invites us to dream.

Her letters take us, page after page, with a smile on our lips, into a dreamlike, playful world where the real and the imaginary merge.

A tender world where even the cruel Nero looks mischievous playing the lyre while the Romans dance with flames as in a ballet, where the tame Lion is nectar for butterflies with his flowery beard, where the laughing Dragon carrying a group of Chinese children into the starry sky, the gentle Blue-eyed Giant takes care of sheep and parachutists, and UFOs bring our alien friends to visit us.

A fabulous world where Venice is a city suspended in the sky and seagulls chatter perched on sticks of barley sugar, where blond Elephants wear baby shoes, and elegant Kangaroos, blue necklaces and red scarves.

A world of sweetness where little Eskimos climb on the Whale’s pearly spray and Teddy Bears are greedy for watermelons.

A surrealistic world where goldfish are denuded by X–Rays and the Painting mirrors the other paintings in the museum and the visitors who, in turn, look at us with an air of amazement and naivety.

The letters of the alphabet are the ingredients of writing, a code established to give shape to our ideas and feelings. Writing can be constricting to us; we can struggle to fix with graphic symbols emotions that sometimes not even the spoken word and gesture can express. But writing is also the brilliant, powerful and liberating vehicle of fertile or demure minds, the tool that allows us to immortalise poems, extraordinary stories and discoveries, tales of everyday life and a child’s first word.

Elena’s letters of the alphabet are all that; they touch us with their freshness and amaze us with their freedom, they open up the doors to an infinite world, that of an independent mind freed from preconceptions and predefined models, a mind perpetually on the move.

Véronique Mounition