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Pernice - Pastel - 1999 - 19.5x18 |
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"FLUTERING IMAGES" ...takes in the smell of the sea. And the pigeons' flight" The woods crossed by sheets of light
and the dim figures on the background are the two forms of expression by which
Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti “writes” her unique vision of reality seen with
lyrical enchantment. Reality is skilfully represented by
means of thickly interwoven signs arranged on the surface of the sheet of paper,
reinterpreted according to the charming texture of the etchings and recently
drawn with the gentle aid of coloured pencils. At this latest stage, the use of
colour has become a technique of crystal-clear musical quality, a capacity to
turn the hard stroke of a swimmer making his way
through the water into a liberating gesture, a challenge with nature, the will to represent the wide-spread arms in the
dauphin style as a strong gesture which seems to scan the
artist’s language. Gesture and subtle emotion, the
transparent depth of aquatint and the azure pulverized in the light of the
pencil, all suggest another key to understand Mrs. Miniotti’s research and her
continuous, inexhaustible, self-conscious technical development which has
enabled this artist to create sginificant pages of figures dissolving into
meditative abstraction. An abstraction where nothing is left
to chance but where each sign, each stroke of the burin, each acid “bite”
work together to draw the “Lights in the Wood” or the “Tryptic of Spring”,
the trees or a butterfly in a kind of “writing” which Francesco De
Bartolomeis has described as follows: “….In any case, her way of
constructing images is fragile and strong at the same time, by means of signs
generating colours on several lighted planes.” Moving on from intertwining branches
and bushes, the painter often turns to the fluttering movement of girls swimming,
to the sea bottom rich in vegetation and
to water games where the sporting effort is joined to the harmony of shapes
gliding softly between waves, reefs or rocks. Beyond the obvious reference to an
athlete’s dive or to a glade with towering birches, Mrs. Viarengo Miniotti’s
research focuses on light and there she finds again
places almost erased from memory, “discovers” the fascination of a
meeting or of a pervading silence covering and fatally hiding everything, and
recovers dormant feelings. An imperceptible, mysterious, powdery light creeping
among the fragments of a landscape, or whirling waters, or open glades that
receive it in all its magic splendour. As the artist brings the sign back to
an inner truth, she rearranges the different moments of existence in the space
of the picture with softness and with the secret enchantment of a dream which
becomes a witness of existential unrest, while the waters look like “Nests
full of panic, metamorphic beings of
the same substance as the gurgling eddies” (Franco Fanelli). Lights and signs and subtle shades of
colour in rarefied atmospheres."
Angelo Mistrangelo
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