Dafne

The love that causes terror.

the first intervention of the Wonderwall project — an open-air museum promoted by the municipality of Cornaredo and curated by artist Cristian Sonda

"Dafne" is a large-scale outdoor mural painted in 2019 on a building wall at Via Cascina Croce in Cornaredo (Milan), as the first intervention of the Wonderwall project — an open-air museum promoted by the municipality of Cornaredo and curated by artist Cristian Sonda with the collaboration of Mary Vono and Yuri Santagostino. The work takes its subject from Ovid's Metamorphoses: the nymph Daphne, pursued by Apollo, is transformed into a laurel tree by her father Peneus at the moment of capture. A woman with auburn hair is seen in close three-quarter view, face upward, expression held between composure and resignation. From her hands — raised, fingers spread — laurel leaves detach and swirl outward, rising into the black ground of the wall. A second hand is visible: larger, darker, reaching in from outside the frame. It is Apollo's hand — not Apollo himself, who Neve chose to leave absent. "He is in love," Neve writes. "Apollo is not the evil — only his gesture is, from Daphne's perspective." Only the gesture is present. The love that causes terror. The terror that causes transformation. The image was generated from a question that resisted resolution: is fleeing from evil courage or cowardice? Neve found the answer — or rather, the refusal of an answer — in the Corpus Hermeticum: doubt itself is evil, because it is dual. He chose to exorcise it by drawing it. As in his studio works "Drift" (2016) and "Le Supplici" (2018), "Dafne" is built on an invisible geometric architecture. The construction lines begin from the constellation of **Capricorn** — half goat, half fish, the symbol of the dual nature at the core of the question. Intersected with these lines is the structural diagram of the **adrenaline molecule**: fear introduced not into Daphne's expression but into the image's source code, its hidden foundation. The **Mano del Rebis** — the alchemical Hand of Rebis, or Mano del Marrano — synthesizes the whole: the hermetic figure of the united opposites, male and female, active and passive, flight and transformation. The expression Neve wanted: "between satisfied and resigned."