Tronchetto (little trunk) - watercolor - 1985

The following  piece of writing by Beppi Zancan  has been chosen to present the watercolors:

“In the Glade”

Mrs Viarengo Miniotti quotes a sentence by Degas: “It is quite good to copy what you can see, but it is much better to draw what you cannot see except in your memory….”. With all the  cconsideration due to Degas,  this statement is misleading because when an artist – or any other lesser mortal – faces reality, he does not actually see what he sees but what the sedimentation over time of endless looks makes him see. Therefore, there is no painter who doesn’t work “from memory,” and the realism of his works depends on his own kind of memory.  

The proof of this lies in these beautiful watercolors, all of them made last year. They are rich in detail, colours and  shades which correspond to reality and suggest it in an almost scientific way, but at the same time they extract from it its music and its essential framework. They remind you of Japanese art and of those European masters, like Klimt, who took fresh nourishment from the east. I regret coming to this exhibition only in its last days beacuse it is one of the best in the season and makes a worthy conclusion of the academic year of the Arte Club Gallery which has always chosen artists and works of  refined artistic and human quality, far from any easy avant-garde conceitedness.  

Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti is a watercolorist of great value, but she also  handles the engraving tools with confidence, which is no wonder since engraving is strangely but undoubtedly connected with watercoloring.  

The subject of these large sheets is always the same: a group of trees at the edge of a clearing in the woods, with closely-intertwining branches and patches of light. The skilful technique and the meditated touch do not take anything  from the freshness of the picture which seems to “sing” a melancholic ballad with the harmonious music of its tints and inlays, so that watchers feel spellbound and “consoled”. Some oil paintings, though depicting the same subjects, lie outside the exhibition which, I think,  finds its complete expression in the watercolors.  

Beppi Zancan