NATURE AS ARTISTIC TRUTH

Micrò Galleria d'arte di Torino

March 6 - 29  2003 - Torino

“Nature as artistic truth” - written by Giacomo Soffiantino

Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti finds in nature the home of her symbols.

In nature, she meets water: water as a restorer of life, water in its movements, in its tension, in its load.

Elisabetta directs her look at the coating of a meadow, mantles it with soft snow, focuses her attention on a birch, “reads” its fragility and its skin.

Elisabetta wanders through the woods looking for certainties, makes excursions on a flower.

All this research of hers is  not done to copy  the water, the meadow, the  birch, the flower, but to obstinately do some painting.

Water becomes something of her own when she robs it of its shapes, its bubbling, its lines, when the same turn into sign, colour, movement, composition.

Her painting skill can distribute pauses, places to rest after spells of excitement, while layer after layer, draft after draft keep the freshness of immediacy.

The mantle of a meadow is a gathering of signs, all of them directed to get neatly arranged, to stay in that part of the surface she has chosen.

The sign is not meant as light and shade, but as a portion of her painting, a sign drawing closer to other signs, crossing, changing  direction, opposing something else for the sake of the total arrangement, intertwining in a web for a plot or a tale.

When Elisabetta  enters a wood, she selects shapes which become humanlike.

They are the persons in her dreams, in her nightmares.

The need to do  some painting eliminates depth and space bringing everything up to the surface  for a tight check, fixing the images of her subjective expressiveness.

In a wood she chooses the elements of her pictures: a birch, roots, a thick forest or a closed space.

The whiteness of a birch inside  the darkness of a wood, a shape where time has engraved its marks.

And finally, man.

Just as Elisabetta has gone into nature, man goes into the water.

And together do they travel, water and man, colour and sign, rest and motion: nature as artistic truth.

Her works are not confined to what they represent but irradiate the mystery that gives life to her paintings, a mystery that makes them last and goes beyond what can be seen.

                                                                                                                       Giacomo Soffiantino

Micrò Galleria d'arte di Torino

Piazza Vittorio Veneto 10 - 10123 Torino

Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti mail@eviarengominiotti.com

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