I paint what I know,

I paint in order to know

1977 - 2004

Castle of the "Contessa Adelaide"

SUSA

aprill 3 - 18 (extended until april the 30th)

From the book review by Pino Mantovani

"I Paint What I know, I Paint to Know

One time back in 1981 Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti met Giacomo Soffiantino who was teaching in the Accademia Albertina nude classes and chose him as her master. It is both true and untrue that this was a turning point in her artistic career. To understand how true it is, just start from the opposite statement: Elizabetta’s works prior to that meeting, on show at the exhibition, such as some interiors and some still lifes with a setting, are only simple approaches to painting (an art which, anyway, she had been practising for years). And yet, they are not, as they show, even then, a precise idea of painting and a good, well-formed taste that future, more mature seasons would not impair but enrich with further knowledge and instruments: I would like to point out her subdued, mainly cold chromatism, her thrifty colouring, thought-out harmonization, careful layout, some framing angles suggestive of an “immersion” in a scene or situation rather than a merely optical perspective, some atmospheres rich in symbols along with a steady attachment to “things alive”, that is, to the freshness of materials and emotions. (A particular mention should also be made of her engravings: She started making some in the late 70’s and was soon attracted by experimentation during the course on techniques held by Riccardo Licata in Venice ).

Soffiantino, who is the most respectful of his students’ personality among the drawing and painting teachers I have met, and is more willing to understand their reasons than to set  and force a  pattern on them, has taught a method to Elisabetta who, in turn, really felt she needed one. In fact, as she was fully aware of the dangers of the “journey”, in spite of careful pre-arrangements and cautious progress, she was looking for a systematic way of planning and doing her work, so that intuition would become clear step by step in a sequence of reasonable stages and could take a definite or, at least, a sufficiently motivated shape. Mrs. Viarengo Miniotti still continues to converse with her teacher though she has fully paid off her debt of dependency on her master. She told me that Giacomo looked a bit puzzled when he saw a recent engraving of hers made by laying the prints from two matrixes one upon the other. I think that he saw there a sort of trick as he is totally averse to masked procedures (but he is not to complex ones), so he wanted to warn his colleague against such simplifications as might compromise her work beyond measure. It should be remarked, however, that Elisabetta defended her choice, taking full responsibility for her solitary adventure, which she justifies in terms of a phantasmal outcome, as painting is more likely than engraving to be appreciated from a distant viewpoint. I have ventured to consider this recent episode as a proof of the type of dialogue Elisabetta and Giacomo started several years ago and is still going on, and to point out that, through this free exchange of opinions, she is encouraged to make responsible choices

.So, in summary, I could say that Soffiantino’s suggestions have been immediately perceived by the meditative nature and the rational spirit of Mrs. Viarengo Miniotti who is particularly sensitive to her responsibility as an artist and wants the images she creates to become more and more clear by degrees, keeping to herself the option of a final shock, the surprising conclusion of a procedure that justifies her approach, at least, or ensures a successful result. Once again, we have the idea of a journey, of a gradual approach involving hard work and passing through a number of demanding choices in order to deserve the achievement of a goal, or, at least, the right to pursue one, no matter how many risks and hardships are needed.

Yet, intuition remains a vital factor, and intuition is, in a way, instantaneous because it mirrors the surfacing of a deeply rooted truth, if any. At the nude classes, Soffiantino suggested she try to cut the times of execution of sketches drawn from life as far as possible. This piece of advice was not given to propose any shortcuts or justify any approximations, but to get her to face the plastic synthesis of the image not in a shy way or absent-mindedly, but directly, giving the chromatic and tonal planes the main role in the figurative construction. (This operation, however, should have been conducted on a model, in order to accept a comparison with one of the most complex and binding structures, i.e., the human body set in a particular environment).Elisabetta has kept several tabletsdating back to that period and she still thinks they represent a crucial point in her painting career. De Staël’s remark has not puzzled this artist: she has fully understood and discussed this reference point in due time, but she knows the role played by that statement in the correct construction of an image. In fact, it is of vital importance to define the background setting and the chromatic structure, a basic element in the characterization of a figure, both when an analytical description prevails and when a marked stylization is effected.

Franco Fanelli, reviewing an anthological exhibition of Mrs. Viarengo Miniotti’s engravings in 1998, pointed out the sharp patience Elisabetta uses to try “the numberless combinations and equations that can be cut into that one- millimetre-thick plate” and, at the same time, to “study composition” and to “exercise her wrist” in order to be able to face various writing and editing tests with a rich store of techniques and an adequate physical and mental training (in fact, the title of the review read “Strategy and Poetry”). The painter, as well as the engraver (I purposely avoid using female terms) keeps on weaving material experiences and expressive techniques, so he is not obliged to give up tackling difficult subjects, as they come up, for lack of mediums. This attitude reveals an approach to art hardly defensible in these times which favour immediate evidence and aggressive improvisation in a stage that could be defined as prelingual; it is quite clear, I think, that Mrs. Viarengo Miniotti’s  “instant” intuition and, possibly, achievement always implies systematic grammatical and syntactic exercise. This artist, however, aims to do something clearly motivated, instead of operating on the language per se, as the so-called “analysts” usually do. In fact, they think that, since language does not exist in itself as mere articulation, it needs articulation governed by rules. As regards Elisabetta, any attempt to achieve and enrich a medium comes from an expressive need and, in turn, each need to express something derives from a specific communicative, descriptive and narrative intention. Each experience is lived and somehow exhausted in a number of experiments with or variations of, language. Maybe the term “exhausted” is not used properly, as one can notice a kind of circular movement in her themes and formal problems. This artist almost always goes back to her experiences and submits them to our attention, over and over again, in a cyclical way, as if they were seasons, always the same and always different. The seasons can be brought back to matter and its elements: earth  (meadows, woods, undergrowth); water (streams, lakes, ponds, pools); water again, but water gathered in an artificial pool inhabited by a fish-man); the air as an all-pervading light that gives life to the earth, for example becoming one with the mantle of snow or with the tangle of grass, moss and lichen, filters through the more or less thick network of branches in a wood, excites the darkness of a pond or makes the transparency of a pond foam and gives life to things from inside, whether they  are parts of vegetation, such as trunks, leaves or flowers, or belong to the animal kingdom, like butterflies or insects, or take the form of human bodies.

But the seasons are also moods and states of mind, so a natural image, either extended or just a detail, becomes a mirror showing inner conditions otherwise elusive and, in a way, unknown. These conditions are not momentary: they stay there, traverse time, give it some chromatic thrills, rather than a particular colour, spread thick graphic marks like nerves across it, which, as Francesco De Bartolomeis, has put it, “are never piercing strokes or painful and deep cuts” but always suggest “ a sense of lightness, like letting your whole body be wrapped and caressed, a feeling of fusion and of conquerable resistance”. In the two corresponding dimensions, the outer and inner one, the real subject is the continuous metamorphosis of the being, natural or artificial, whatever it is Here a name comes to mind, a name both fragile and frightful, the name of Bonnard, because Bonnard, more than any other modern painter, is the artist who gives a sense of permanent instability, of a reality ever vibrating, yet staying the same on the two sides, the psychical and the objective one.

De Staël, mentioned before, and Bonnard are two basic, apparently unshakeable points of reference for Mrs. Viarengo Miniotti. I remember that, when Soffiantino was challenged by Francesco De Bartolomeis to point out two terms of reference during a recent conversation, he chose Monet and Rothko plus Rembrandt. These artists may seem incompatible, but they are not for Soffiantino who explains (and Elisabetta also shares his view): “Their diversity proves that I was not looking for a model, but I was trying to penetrate into the mystery of painting. I was fascinated by Rothko’s extended colouring, but I needed to put things in those spaces…” As regards Mrs. Viarengo Miniotti, who looks at De Staël and Bonnard, she, too, stresses the contrast between partition and articulation, synthesis and descriptive-narrative analysis, all of it amenable to a “set of feelings” (defined by De Bartolomeis as “strong feelings which possess the meditative artist, become obsessive and urge him to express himself….”). I would like to add that it is typical of artists to activate some short circuits, to fill unfillable distances, and to find relationships where the common aye only sees differences. Thus, for Viarengo Miniotti Bonnard is the painter who has proved the persistence of a ghost, De Staël the one who has perceived the transience of structure, and light is a main and revealing element for both. Light removes weight and thickness and stops colour changes.

After all, Elisabetta is not new to contradictions, if any. At an exhibition which took place back in 1995 where she showed “Swimmers” for the first time, I think, she surprised me by recalling her passion for Mantegna, the artist she discovered when she faced the Artistic Maturity Exam with the usual enthusiasm (at the time, she was no more a teenager, because she really felt she needed  “professional” training). Then she showed me some exercise-books of hers with notes and drawings she had made to methodically study the features of ancient painting and sculpture; still now, some drawings by Mantegna (and Giambellino), as well as some copies from Moore – who has wrought out some extremely modern solutions from the same painters – hang on the walls of her studio.

   “I understood Mantegna this way”, she said to me, “and this artist still teaches me a lot with his subtle precision without tricks”. At the time I remarked, and still maintain, that “if one does not forget Mantegna, he can try to paint a body dissolving itself in water, and even a puddle of blue-coloured water overflowing from the sheet-pool with skill and neatness”. Mantegna is an extraordinary example of a cutting mark, but he, as well as his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini, is an artist who knows how to make air and light flow through his villages and does not set his characters apart against a natural background even when they are in sharp profile. Obviously, she does not carry the comparison with the Paduan painter too far, but it is not without meaning that Elisabetta’s effective tools of the trade are the pastel which enables you to colour by drawing and to draw colours, and the watercolour which lets you “x-ray” the shape, i.e., perceive the structure through the transparency of the chromatic veil. Finally, it should be noticed that she considers the engraved and printed mark one of the places where chromatism is most intensely noticeable. But then, the play of cross-references becomes complicated: for example, the non traumatic way Rembrandt uses an engraving by Mantegna (two drawings, from Rembrandt and from Bellini, stay together inside one frame in Elisabetta’s studio), and, closer to our times, Mario Calandri’s taste for the picturesque in his graphic works, come to mind.

Pino Mantovani

Click on the image to enlarge it

Some images from the Exhibition

Seasons

Alpine thistles

Susa - Via al Castello

Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti mail@eviarengominiotti.com

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