The following piece ofwriting by Bruno Quaranta presents the exhibition:

Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti’s corner  is a mythical landscape.

It is a magic oasis where gnomes, imps and elphs from Yeats’s world could live, as if  by magic, other lives and dance again in a ring around themselves, the things and the elements. An obstinate, gentle, restless guardian whose restlessness derives from an extreme, high-pitched, psychic sensitivity: this is how this “aquatic” lady is, shows herself  and wants to be defined. She goes deep into the waters and comes up again a thousand times following her inexhaustible, lucid and fearless  curiosity.

A lake is the scenery Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti watches, portraits, reinvents and delves into. An alpine lake alien to dusky colours, intimate walks, rustling sounds, frail steps or lace handkerchiefs.

From one painting, or watercolor, to another,  a challenge takes shape, face to face with nature seen as neither benign nor malignant like an evil stepmother, but  simply and dramatically as nature in itself, a reality and a goal, an eternal reality where nothing is created and nothing is destroyed but everything is changed over the centuries, where everything lies  and  rises again.

Metamorphosis, that’s the word to define  Mrs Viarengo Miniotti’s art. She is  the poetical witness of the seasons which come and go, never quite the same, ruffled, whimsical and capricious like De André’s clouds.  She has been given the rare chance to be admitted to the best of shows,  to watch decay and lush growth, sunset and dawn, crudity and quietness, the evil hour and the splendid embrace. She can recognize the last remains  of Eden which still survive and are blissful only for those who grope their way  across the worn-out daily routine, across the miserable blind circles generated by inhuman ignorance.

Who made this remark after “watching” Willem  De Kooning?: “Abstraction in painting is the purely aesthetic element added to  all the rest, and the rest is  made actual by things taken from life.

Trying to solve this abstract elememt and to make it the only concern of painting  means leaving painting altogether to end up in the “ philosophers’ tower”.

Ivory is not Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti’s shelter, but  grey, green and material azure are the colours she gathers to summon “things”, such as waters and trunks, river banks and branches, stones, paths and birds’ nests.

Things in human shape,  figures dissolved in humus, decaying, transfigured, penetrated into the

Earth. For, as Rilke knew well, “Our task is to penetrate so deeply, painfully and passionately into this provisional and unstable Earth. We are the bees  of invisibility. We incessantly gather the honey of visible things to store it  in the big golden beehive of invisibility”.

Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti glides, wanders and dominates between visibility and invisibility. As  Giacomo Soffiantino, her painting master, did not fail  to notice, she can change  the “remains “ of creation, the extreme roots, the uncorrupted gold nuggets, the ailing sore barks of trees into  the “body of painting.” A dowser, that’s what she is, a bee that mirrors itself in the mountain basins, offering them her dazzled and dazzling mask, breathing in their air which is now  esoteric, now terrifyingly pure, now beyond the here and now,  moulded in who knows which universe.

A rapturous frontier, throbbing with life at the same time, where love for life and despair for life, sunbeams and darkness are immense, cyclopic, titanic energies. Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti does not hesitate to cross them, identify them and make them shine. To go down with her into the whirlpool is light and easy.