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Acqueo (Aquatic) - oil painting on canvas - 1998 80x100 |
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The following piece of
writing by Pino Mantovani has been chosen to present her paintings:
"The
Swimmer, the Water and the Light The rich texture making up
the whole of Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti’s production consistently
includes her present stage of work
(I use this term on purpose to underline the painter’s systematic activity), a
further confirmation of her interest in the “immersed” shapes she has
favoured for a long time: mosses and lichens in the skin of the trunks, trunks
and branches in the thick of the wood, swarming life in the underwood, remnants
of vegetation made precious by decay, objects and traces in the layers of memory,
and so on. This painting, however, is
particularly surprising and so demanding as to be a hazard for its author for
many reasons. 1’) Because, in the context of the
contraction and extension of a
detail against a wider background, she dares
to choose the most excellent of bodies, the
naked human body which for
centuries has been the object of endless anaylises which, in turn, have shaped
its compact structure and its unequalled, tightly-woven articulation. 2’) Because the opponent facing the
human body is water, a shapeless, supple, elusive body which defies the senses,
especially the eye, though our sight is attracted and even charmed by it, so
that in the reason-guided Occident
artists who wanted to picture water have mainly pictured its container or its
boundaries, or have just tried to show,
by approximation, some characteristics of water, such as brilliance and reflecting power (by reflecting, water
pretends to be as substanbtial as the things it reflects). Without wondering if
and when water has begun to be pictured as it is, I
will just point out that Mrs. Viarengo not only paints and draws water,
but she does, as it were, “from inside” so that the outside is shown by
irradiation in its reflections and transparencies. It is just like seeing the
rest from the center of the water. 3’) In the impact, the immersed body takes something from the water and the water takes something from the body. This is noticeable even if the two terms of comparison never lose their identity, at least in the works shown in this exhibition. In fact, the swimmer’s body can be recognized from its specific gestures, as the painter does not forget her personal experiences of floating and sinking and carefully and freely studies a textbook on swimming techniques, and with the same precision analyzes water for its characteristic qualities of reaction to a foreign body, such as waves, gurgling, eddies, reflections, glimmering, flashes, transparency, clouding, dimness, and so forth.
4’) It is a major challenge to face
all these complications in the details and in the
whole picture with rather simple and
clearly stated pictorial and
graphic means. This feature
leaves me both admiring and puzzled because it is most “poor” and risky. So I wonder: can water be painted by
means of water? Can the dissolving of a solid body
in water be pictured as
water liquefying a powdered pigment or a compressed one? Is this dissolution
just mere equivalence or does it
have a metaphorical meaning, as I believe the art of painting
should ? I removed these doubts when the artist
showed me a book of written and drawn notes she once made in order to study
the characteristics of ancient painting and sculpture (when she was preparing
for a Maturity exam), and said: “This was how I understood Mantegna, an
artist who is still teaching me a lot because of his subtle and unaffected
precision” Well, if Mantegna’s teachings are
not forgotten, one can try to paint a body dissolving in water, and even an
azured “pool of water” which overflows from the swimming pool-sheet,
with clearness and skill. When all is said and done, without
denying my previous statements, I
must stress the most evident point: Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti keeps on
researching and painting light as a tonalist, even when light is dazzling
and it is hard to bring it back to its tonal range. Her waters, her bodies in water are a further measure of light, of a light which gets more and more unstable as a protagonist in the metamorphoses of appearance."
Pino Mantovani |
