Isola di San Rocco al ponte delle Ripe

Mondovì

1993

Vertical forest

SEARCHING IN THE WOODS

     What lies at the source of Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti’s images  but some bits, some fragments of nature?

     Yet, these should be watched as one looks at  the pages of an album of  memory: a strip of wood or a landscape stained with rare bushes, as well as the bright tangle of a sun imprisoned among the branches of a tree or of a piece from the skin of a birch-tree trunk  stretching out, with its  end  flap on the right connected to the one on the left.

     So,  both in her tempera paintings and engravings a spacial reality is restored  in the mind, rather than just represented, in the concrete form of figures endowed with essential values, partaking of  an inner world of expression.

     After less than one year from her personal  exhibition arranged in the rooms of “Tuttagrafica” in Turin, where she put together a score of engravings,  all dating from the Nineties, Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti is showing them again in these days, as if to compare them with a selection of her pictorial production on paper belonging to the same period.

     These paintings sometimes anticipate the same wood subjects and  sometimes take them up again, putting to a severe test the ways of expression of a keen sensitivity and the commitment of a kind of  “cross research”, by which the creative artist passes from some complex techniques dominated by impulsive signs to other techniques characterized by factors more typically induced by a subtle chromatic inspiration.

     The object – a part of a birch-tree trunk, a  simple bark (to be seen in its entire length), or a node, as well as the visual network of an entire Wood in the Sun, or  The Fallen Tree – each time seems to be placed at the centre of a cross-fire directed from different points to the subject which, in turn, is regarded as the opportunity  for a number of unique re-creative researches, without ever yielding  to the idea of a simple, linguistic derivation  tending to pass from one image to another through  an almost continuous series of more or less suggestive, induced provocations.

     In other words, we will never find  an engraving derived from a tempera painting  or vice versa,  but only from  life or from a sketch that had  prearranged the essence of the subject taken from real life,  leaving  future developments unprejudiced.

     In the large engraved pages (up to 65x50 cm., the size of “Cracks”), a careful instrumental use of other techniques, in addition to the arrangement of the signs made by etching, prevails: precise and very fine burin strokes, such as in “Horizontal Pattern” or in “Naturalistic Network”, to which one can add “Bark”, owing to the joint action of the drypoint and the roulette dotting (in  “Development  of a Birch-tree”); plus direct etching or picturesqueness occasionally corrected by means of the burnisher (such as in “Trees” or “In the Wood”), one of the media for mezzotint, the technique characterizing “The Big Shadow” or “The Black Tree”, also shown in this exhibition.

     It is interesting to notice how an outstretched bark or the thickest network of vegetation  in Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti’s works take on the appearance and the spirit of an old palimpsest, of  an ancient surface on which Time itself has finally left its layered imprint.

     Perhaps this is what Pino Mantovani had also remarked about “Tree Lying Flat”, when he defined this work as “The successful matching up of the two times, the time of the picture and the time of reality”. This is like saying that “ The time of things observed has been travelled on together with the time when the picture was created”.

     I have the impression that Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti is now capable of building up the structures connected with the reality she observes and turns into fairly tales and dreams, while keeping a vivid, clear memory of it, as of things personally experienced, though subsequently relegated to the innermost, almost subconscious levels.  These experiences get mixed with other emotional projections and finally give  a support not only to merely formal dictates, but also and particularly to a flexible, sensitive language.

     The events giving life to her figures are present in her most humane plots, which are pure and true,  even in the stroke of the etching needle, as well as in the thin layer of colour where sensuality is softened by a sign of sentimental transparency.

                                                                                                             Angelo Dragone

Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti mail@eviarengominiotti.com

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