MAON, 19th and 20th century art museum in Rende (CS)
_800x1066.jpg "ANNA ROMANELLO - PHOTOGRAPHY AND MEMORIES")
June 9, 2018
ANNA ROMANELLO
PHOTOGRAPHY AND MEMORIES
curated by Barbara Martusciello and Tonino Sicoli
Inauguration: June 9, 2018, 6:30 pm
At the MAON, the Museum of 19th and 20th Century Art in Rende (Cs), the inauguration will take place on June 9, 2018 at 6:30 pm the exhibition “ANNA ROMANELLO - Photography and memories” curated by Barbara Martusciello and Tonino Sicoli, with pictorial-photographic works, verbovisual engravings, artist's books and objects by the multifaceted artist-performer of Calabrian origin but French training.
During the evening, a video by Enrico De Bernart will be presented, dedicated to her works.
Born in Corigliano Calabro, after studying at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Romanello moved to Paris, to the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and to Atelier 17 of S.W. Hayter, where she specialized in graphic techniques and experimented with new methodologies with internationally renowned artists and engravers.
After returning to Rome, she worked at the Calcografia Nazionale and the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome from 1986 to 2016 as a teacher of Engraving Techniques. She has participated, among other things, in “IIe Manifeste du Livre d’Artiste” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, “Parcours” at the Festival d’Avignon and “21th International Biennal of Graphic Art” in Ljubljana.
Tonino Sicoli writes: "The matter dematerializes, the image becomes light. This is how Anna Romanello faces the linguistic passage between techniques and poetics, between the semantic and manual spheres. Artistic practice has an advantage over the recording of reality, in the sense that it goes beyond appearance and discovers the essence, rummaging in the depth of meaning and digging into the unconscious.
Here is Romanello who captures the papyrus of verbo-visual signs, modern and pre-linguistic hieroglyphics, photo-graphic patterns, which translate reality visited in symbols of history and creativity, of a sweet and sensitive female anthropology. Painting and engraving combine with performance and conceptual art, introducing collage and using photography, creating artist's books, with scratched paper and with zinc and copper plates. The white light focuses on a visibility in dim light; grazing rays color assemblages of ready-mades and petits objets, fragile display cases of things-thoughts.
Starting from the abstract engravings of William Hayter, his master, Romanello recovers the mixed art of Fluxus and Nouveau Rèalisme, of the verbal-visual research inclined to writings, photos, new-media. Marked by Pollock-style dripping or Dorazio-style streaks, these picto-graphic-photo-gestural works are global, material-luminous objects in the wake of Kossuth and Calzolari.
Engraving is an act of discovery and fixing of one's own self, subtle but profound. A translucent world emerges from the opaque background of an ancient land, made of traces, finds, excavations.
With the tip of a burin and an incisive gaze, Romanello skims the surface of the unknown, kidnaps it and inverts it into a strong and intriguing message."
"The artist - Barbara Martusciello points out - makes all this a symphony that heals the contrasts or, at least, places them side by side in a non-belligerent relationship. A certain drama in this inter/action of his is not excluded, given that it occurs with a hand-to-hand fight with painting, even when it involves a sign, drawing, engraving, tear; in short, a dose of pathos is there and remains in her work: the very combative gestural expressionism of Emilio Vedova is not entirely foreign to her, nor is an abstract actionism that involves the use of a lot of physicality to paint, mark and scratch works that are often large in size, which she also places on the ground when she intervenes; and Alberto Burri is not unknown to her polymaterial practice either, which – abbwe said – includes the caesura, the scratch, the laceration, the juxtaposition of different materials and, therefore, a search for another form.
This underlined, the result is surprisingly harmonious. We have seen how Anna manages to move indifferently between pictorial exercise, sometimes with installation – it should not be forgotten! – and usually with engraving and increasingly with the introduction of photography, and how every treatment, even a clear one, of techniques and materials manages to determine an unusual euphony. So: even the past and the present, as concepts and as real presences, coexist in his works in a silent agreement and sometimes in a correspondence of loving feelings: many of those stimulated by the wonderful archaeological site of the Roman Houses of Celio, then exhibited there in a beautiful ad hoc exhibition, demonstrate this."
The exhibition, which will remain open until July 14, 2018, was organized by the "A. Capizzano" Center of Rende, with the patronage of the Municipality of Rende and with the collaboration of the Alpeh Center of Lamezia Terme.
