Vibrazioni Sottili

On Wednesday 25 September, at 7 pm, Prometeogallery by Ida Pisani opens the first solo exhibition of Rosanna Rossi (1937, Cagliari) in the spaces of the gallery in Milan, Via Giovanni Ventura 6, continuing and systematizing the process of rediscovery of the Sardinian artist and his work produced during a creative career of over sixty years marked by continuous experimentation.

Subtle vibrations is the title suggested by Alfredo Cramerotti, who intervenes to accompany the exhibition with a critical text, to propose a reading inspired by the idea of rhythm as the ever-living and necessary contradiction between the rigor of structures and the flow of life.

Rosanna Rossi began with a figure of expressionist ancestry, in whose harsh deformation we find some of the memories that marked her deeply, namely the period of the war and teaching in the psychiatric hospital in Cagliari, where she taught painting to hospitalized people. When, from the artistic point of view, the relationship with space begins to become more and more urgent, she arrives at the non-figurative, finding a personal form of freedom through a rich symbolism created ad hoc that has allowed her to transform the biographical dimension into universal reflection. This artistic turning point, which is ascribed to the specific desire to make the visible perceptible, takes shape from the seventies with the series of canvases that arise from the overlapping of bands of color (Bande Colorate) and lines (Beautiful lines) that give harmony and rhythm to the composition, standing out on white areas, as if to create a break in the chromatic melody. These works, devoid of any descriptive complacency, articulate a plot of emotional concentration, as if each took charge of the presence of those who observe them.

At the same time, Rosanna Rossi is faced with another urgency, namely the use of different materials. Material was in fact the means of expression that could best characterize an artistic research that has its roots in the personality of the artist. Thus, almost at the end of the seventies, gauze and string were destined for creative use. The gauze, with which Rosanna Rossi wrapped her husband, was soaked, covered with color and then pulled on a series of canvases (Garze) with the rigor of a linear path of extraordinary symbolic value. The strings have been stretched on the canvases (Spaghi) to mark horizontal lines and then rhythmic in different ways, vibrating according to the thickness of the material, to give shape to new scores that are geometric and musical at the same time.

In the following decades his painting was confirmed as an expression of light (Carati), where light is color and time is rhythm. This personal pictorial language that Rosanna Rossi has been able to transcribe bears the signs of the gracefulness of a hand and a female mind. Her painting, like music, originates from knowledge. It is first a purely intellectual fact and then physical, that is to say, visual and corporeal. And it is feminine. In her, in her maternal soul, generous, friend and guest, as well as in her painting, prevails the master figure of this genre, the roundness. Lea Vergine, in one of her writings, said that Rossi "lives in a place of exile and fullness and looks with her eyes turned towards the inside”. Well, fullness is roundness and it can be found in the language of Rosanna Rossi who, exquisitely formal, goes out to meet the world, closing, hypnotically, the circle. With her emotional attitude she invests the spatial dimension, which appears in the series of Porte D’Oriente, a real sensory perceptive experience. They project the viewer into them, insinuating immediately, and inevitably, a question: "inside or outside"? We do not limit ourselves to observing these doors, on the contrary we embark on a journey, completely personal, along a trajectory in which Rosanna Rossi lets herself be sighted more closely. But also the temporal dimension, which appeared from the first layers of signs and colors, is invested. It happens with the works of the Forma Sonata series, which recover the tradition of the fourteenth/ fifteenth century predella, the synthetic tale that served to integrate the representation of large paintings with secondary scenes. Along the lines of Rosanna Rossi creates these canvases constituting a real meeting place.

Finally, there are the years of works created with apparently poor and waste means, combined with a refined contemporary assembly. They are mainly objects of use: fragments of bottles, brushes, rubber gloves (Guanti), abrasive wool pads (Mezze maniche; Pagliette di ferro). It all began in the nineties with steel wool. It is a fascinating process, an intriguing metamorphosis of things, a virtuous reconversion of the used, which is born again alchemically with the hand of the artist.

Realizing a desire that required three years of work, and drawing on the metaphor of musical progression, the selection of works presented in the exhibition bears witness to a reality like that of Rosanna Rossi who, having always proceeded in an abstract direction, with a strong intellectual content as well as a precise civil and socio-political commitment, is perfectly in tune with the spirit of Prometeogallery and more relevant than ever in the debate on art and female identity today. She who "never looks like", who throughout her path has gone through a consistent, and always manifest, become process, has been able to transform the work into a new alphabet of shapes and colors, spaces and surfaces that continuously awaken the imaginative capacity, giving back, punctually, a harmonious beauty and never provocative.