In the beautiful setting of the Biblioteca Umanistica dell’Incoronata in Milan, a veritable jewel of 16th-century architecture, Marisa Settembrini, Italian painter of proven pictorial insight, has had her latest works admired by a flow of visitors. The display was part of the “Quartetto per l’Incoronata”, an exhibition dedicated to celebrating sacred art and particularly the Vergine dell’Incoronata, which is venerated not only in Milan but throughout Southern Italy, especially in the Capitanata region of Apulia. It must be said that over the past decade Settembrini’s painting has undergone a continuous evolution, with images being broken down into signs and splashes of colour, which sometimes appear as clouds of hue that seem to drop a thousand trickles from above down over the canvas, etching away the thread that holds together the heavens and the earth.
Nevertheless Marisa Settembrini had begun to paint in the 1970s, in an atmosphere of new figuration, as was then the name of that sector of avant-gardism propounding the renewal of painting. She made herself known at the Rome Quadriennale, and right from her first exhibitions, in Italy and abroad – particularly in New York – she attracted the attention of the more qualified critics for the novelty of her works and their originality which was later to find many references. In her works, depicting impressionistic images seemingly bound for consumption, or rather for reduction, Roberto Sanesi, a scrupulous critic and a learned intellectual, observed an initial system of informal painting and then a new form of visual painting as spectrum of visual poetry. There were wild mazes of colour which yet managed to bestow on the canvas cultivated emotions, without disallowing references to reality, to subjects, to traces of academe.
This research has intensified over the years, saving the image exclusively as a new icon – indeed, an ultra-new icon, extracted from the ancient texts and contexts, and implanted with new techniques: from collage to writings, from sign to gesture. This was a new reading, emerging from American avant-garde painting, where traces and signs would kindle memories and at the same time evoke the world of advertising, as well as the writings, the words, the media by which we are daily deluged. From Andy Warhol to Mario Schifano, this reading has been open to a multitude of opportunities. In Settembrini’s works, analogies have been replaced by cultured readings, salvaged icons, new contemporary icons, images selected among thousands, first decontextualized and then recognized in a sea of colour, of coloured waters, of jutting signs as if inside a tornado. Works like “linea di luna nuova, nell’amore, incoronata” tend to highlight this consonance, often articulated over a series of canvases, some small and others larger, but all brimming with poetry. According to Prof. Andrea Del Guercio, the compositional structure of these paintings, through signs and lines and writings and colour, offer solutions of aesthetic unity, leaving aside personal projections of faces and bodies, or at least parts of bodies, bearing testimony to that great and never-forgotten lesson acquired at the portrait school of the Kunst Akademie in Munich.
Then one understands how the academic and the new can come together under a sort of modernity in these recent canvases and works by Settembrini who can be counted among the foremost sophisticated European painters for the originality, the culture, and the dialectic force of her painting. Words, alphabets, and writings, are all elements revolving around splashes of colour, as well as over picture-collages, as in the “serie de l’angelo”.
And among writings, iconography and colours there is the whole world, or rather a many-part narrative, always new and fully experienced.

(trad. Interpres sas Giussano)