Personal Site of Gasparini Alessandra Painter
Events 06
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The Art as the exploration of the Self
Childhood stories, psychological archetypes and elegiac estrangements in Alessandra Gasparini's painting
Alessandra Gasparini's works are "forests of symbols" to say it using a Baudelaire's syntagma. Her production could be obviously commented on, analized, taking into high consideration their remarkable technical skilfulness, their mimetic ability to render accurately the tactile sensation - as well as the visual one- of the materials, or the incisive way the expression of their characters are characterized. But this approach would be a limited view at the phenomenal evidence. Alessandra Gasparini goes beyond such allurements of charmed looks ( even if such looks shouldn't be demonized!) and she penetrates into mental and psychic paths where, in order to understand her, it is necessary to follow her with delicacy, silently through innermost and measureless paths, in a receptive listening state. The exegetic course is therefore inductive in order to register inflections, shakings, allusive atmospheres and moods. You try to fix all these components through objectivity, in a way not detached, rather with involvement
Alessandra Gasparni's unity of recent production strikes us, it takes shapes within the terms of an "organized system of images" which presents a coherent articulation of "mechanism of the thought" well settled by now. Her purpose is the description of an interior universe made up of dreams, apparitions, symbols, fancies or even more of "unrealistic states". They are built into the mind and have never happened in the objective reality of the measurable events. In this sense we may daringly claim that the artist's paintings make visible what is not visible ( the visible state which usually takes place in the dreamlike dimension, in the wanderings of the sleeping and waking condition, in the hidden state of the unconscious). Alessandra Gasparini's compositions often create - or rather give substance to concreteness- psychological and relational archetypes: by the same standard of Warburg's Pathosformeln, they are placed out of the time, we should rather say they place themselves indirectly to it. They take their strength from their virtue to express emotional contents which change from particular ones into universal ones. Thanks to this, the survival and the absolutization of the gestures, of the expressions and of the experiences bedded in the memory, is possible.
The imagination world is linked mainly to the childhood, to the feelings, to the anxieties, to the fears, to the games and to the childish daydreams which belong to that crucial, terrific, enchanting and frightful age.
The young, little disturbing girls painted by Gasparini, wear "d'antan" large clothes, very tight corsets and bell-shaped skirts embellished with tassels, lace, muslins and frills. Their bodies seems to be concealed by their clothes to the point you miss the perception of their bodies and it may happen that a little dress ( "Vestina" one of Gasparini's work title) turns into a sort of armour worn by the young protagonist to protect her from alleged dangers which may be feared by paranoid grown-ups.
There is a recurrant setting: the interiors of old homes with early twentieth century grit floors. The lenticular output and the almost photographic and faultless definition of the shapes are in contrast with the atmosphere of the scenes. From time to time this atmosphere presents an unexplainable obscurity; the alienated amazement when you come to face a puzzle which you can't understand; sadness, the feeling of the expectation and the suspense or an astonished and enjoyed wander.
The analytical precision of the representation does not go with the detachment in the performance or with a claim to the objectivity because in Gasparini's paintings there is always a subtle atmosphere which seems almost enchanted and fixed in a dreaming steadiness stressed by a cold and dense light which invades calmly the motionless spaces; some unrelated and external elements may also appear ( such as the ending part of an elephant trunk) and these elements overturn the pattern of a situation which appeared to be plain. But the mystery does not penetrate directly into the represented world, into the voiceless stories which in the fixity of an instant made eternal, are being shown to the gazer ( it is worth mentioning the narrative feature of this painting). The mystery lays hidden behind the represented world, it is hidden under the surface of the visible, therefore the characters and the things end up being magic signs of themselves.
It is an art where the mental factor plays a fundamental role, it works as a filter of each objects and leads us into another dimension where our life is being projected, building up pyschological places. It is then that the descriptional and abstract purity, the color masses shaped with exact balance, the sharp outlines, the attentive design of the scenes infuse an elegiac restlessness. This could be considered the specific trait of the artist, a feature which is predominant in Alessandra Gasparini's pictorial production. In the light of a stylistic profile or a conventional language, it is possible to find in her work, some references starting from the Pre-raphaelites to Balthus, or a surrealistic trace ( see Delvaux). The works, seen in a symbolist light, can present a symbolist matrix ( see Puvis de Chavannes and Mareés, Schwabe and Simberg, Vrubel and Somov). But the original strength of an unbroken and stubborn personality leaves a steady mark of a peculiar flick.
We are living in a sinister age where you have "the feeling you are walking towards the darkest time of the world" as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his last letter.
The man is slowly influenced by the society, by the dictatorship of the finance, by the dull pervading system of the "consume" information, he forgets how to use his own hands and his own brain, and carelessly goes for the slavery. It is therefore well welcome an art such as Alessandra Gasparini's one. It invites us to explore ourselves and consequentely to cast a look on the others in a different way.
Paolo Bolpagni