Care

A robin on the wall of the Red Cross — care as a gesture, a symbol, an image.

Care is a mural commissioned by the Croce Rossa Italiana and created by artist Neve in September 2023 in Prignano sulla Secchia, Modena.

A large-scale exterior mural on the facade of the Croce Rossa Italiana (Red Cross) building in Prignano sulla Secchia, a small town in the Modena province of Emilia-Romagna, painted in September 2023. The technique is spray and roller — and the compositional approach marks a further development of Neve's kintsugi work: the building's facade is treated as a broken surface, its fragments held together by gold lines in the manner of the Japanese art of mended ceramics, each shard showing a different register of image. The fragmented surface carries three kinds of matter: a painted blue sky with clouds — the real sky on the ground, contained within a ceramic shard; a porcelain-style floral pattern, peonies in deep burgundy and mauve on white ground, rendered with the precise delicacy of painted ceramic; and the bare warm render of the building wall itself — present, unmediated, made equal to the painted panels it borders. The gold kintsugi lines move across all of these surfaces, joining them into a single composition that spans the full height and width of the building. At the centre of the composition, occupying the largest and most luminous shard: a blonde child in a grey T-shirt, hands cupped together in front of their chest, holding a small robin — pettirosso — and looking upward with an expression of absorbed wonder. The figure is lit from above, the background a painted sky continuous with the shards around it. The work is inspired by Oscar Wilde's story "The Nightingale and the Rose" — but in Neve's version, the nightingale becomes a robin (pettirosso): a smaller, more intimate bird, a bird of proximity and domesticity rather than romantic tragedy. The theme the mural carries is care — "prendersi cura" — the act of tending to something fragile, something living. The choice of the Red Cross building as setting gives this theme an explicit institutional echo: the body whose vocation is the care of others. The kintsugi approach connects this work formally to Neve's earlier use of the technique — but here extended to the scale of an entire building facade, where the broken ceramic is not an object but an architecture. The resonance with the geographic context is not incidental: Prignano sulla Secchia is located near Sassuolo, the world capital of ceramic tile production, a region whose identity has been shaped for centuries by the making of porcelain and earthenware.