An actor and a painter have so much in common. The need to be absolutely 'empty' and absolutely ‘present' at the same time. The dilemma of how to reconcile the so-called 'fiction' with the so-called 'reality'. The custom of the mystery of the image and its power. The constant search for the boundary between neutrality and expressiveness: it is on that boundary that one wins or is lost.  Isabella Ferrari lives with discretion and lightness the dilemmas of the actor, the artist. She abandons with kind reluctance. She is flying without detaching her feet from the ground. She prefers to be portrayed in black and white, but the memory of her colours remains impressed, all light but indelible in graphicness. From Isabella's total femininity one would expect chaos. But her great, unlikely patience makes her suitable to create. And everything Isabella creates is warm and calm: the house, the set, the stage, the character. A great poet wrote: "Life gives us always more or less than we ask, only ourselves can be the exact measure. But in truth it is so rare to be able to live to measure oneself. Isabella does it and so, without apparent effort, she also does her duty as a film star: she makes us dream. She seems intimately close to us and wisely unreachable, as for example when, in a scene of seduction in The Great Beauty, she makes a listless, wanting, memorable walk backwards, to disappear beyond the threshold of the bedroom. Isabella is inviting us to reach her in the shadows? Because a shadow must be there! But no, rather Isabella invites us to accept that shadow, like everything else, is nothing more than a game... 

Francesco Clemente