The
recent invitation to Cremona's Biennale with three great works together
with Emilio Tadini and Valerio Adami (all share a common narrative vein),
the recent exhibition at Museo Tencalla in Bissone-Lugano and a great anthological
exhibition at Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts, confirmed the lively interest
that the art of collecting, both Italian and foreign, had for the works
of Marisa Settembrini, one of Italy's most important, courageous as well
as new artists, thanks to the poetical choices and esthetical search she
recently began to show. She began in the late seventies with an expressionist
painting which helped build the world and the colours of the South on her
canvases, but also images of faces, profiles, portraits saved in memories
and in memory or included in a landscape whose tones had the mystery of
the waiting.
This young painter seemed
already to be destined to become a new and sure talent, and she immediately
ranked very high among Italy's portrait-painters, which pushed Milan's
municipality to present an exhibition of “Milanese portraits” in the museum
in Via Sant'Andrea. It was not a mere phenomenon of signs and drawing,
but also a psychological strength, a trembling emotion, a swinging colour.
The great respect for the
classical antiquity, and especially the will to be part of that painting
as a return to a painted painting that could link the new and the old,
the present as a research, and tradition, allowed Settembrini to open at
the end of the eighties that new phase of “quoting” which has so well been
understood by Roberto Sanesi and Domenico Montalto.
The short phase marked by
informal landscapes, of canvas or support filled with magmatic colours,
opened in that powerful collage that the artist inserted, and it was a
sacred and profane image, an image of body and face, of glance and position,
which would be violently removed from the original context to be inserted
here and to mean a different esthetical system.
A collage, a torn image,
a decollage that does not remind us of Rotella or of any other Italian
and foreign painters, but rather an ancient window on the present, a cast
made of a subtle lyricism, an important culture that grafts the visual
apparatus among clouds of colours, signs and visible traces.
Settembrini's pictorial
search was, and still is today, a subtle and creative sampling that only
apparently abandoned the painted and portrayed image to remake that “chiasmage”
that Kolar, and the visual poets before him, the Futurists and Berlin's
dada used.
However, the charming cloud
of colour and matter surrounding these icons of the year two thousand,
fragmented with signs, segments and, recently, with a geometric world made
of squares, triangles and lunettes, again highlights the subtle and mysterious
soul that overlooks everything, sets its profile and aura.
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Italian
Mensile di scienza medica e attualita`
