Critique
For Bernadette the image does not disregard the human figure precisely because it is in the often dynamic excavation of the figure itself that the artist creates her own expressive code with a balance between sign and colour. A sign and a color that are articulated without breaks with a well-conducted gesture with a great sense of freedom. THE "INSIDE" and the "FAR" are for the expressive ways of a desire, a curiosity, to explore reality.
I've always gone on vacation to a place that I never mention just like that mushroom picker who advises to go to the left when the mushrooms are to the right. There is something obscene about the feeling of sharing at all costs. Beautiful things must also be kept hidden. How the Genoese managed to keep the rest of the world from understanding that their city is one of the wonders of creation remains a mystery to me. They are all aware of it, but they do not tell it to others, on the contrary, if anything, they put the smoke machine into action to confuse the waters, so as not to make the foreigner understand how beautiful their city is, Genoa, of which they are very jealous . I would like to warn the inhabitants of the Ligurian capital that their fellow citizen Bernadette Pisano is betraying them. In Lombardy, every time she mentions her place of origin, she lights up. For her, it is the center of the world. Her brushes bring intimate situations to life with spiritual colors. Reality is transfigured. Anyone who observes finds himself an invisible spectator in the room where, in the summer, without veils, the landlady takes a siesta, lying on the blue sofa and embracing the pillow. Can one be catechumen and very free at the same time? Bernadette Pisano seems to say yes. The abandoned figures of men and women evoke the sacredness of the body that we have borrowed for this life and that we will eventually have to return. Flowers, gardens, streets, beams of light, real and invented clothes, arcades, shadows, postures and architectures. This and more lead Bernadette Pisano to lightly celebrate a non-light sense of life and to transmit it to us with a clean joy in full contrast with today's art.
In Bernadette Pisano's research, two elements recur like a leitmotiv, energy, a decisive inner energy, at times disruptive, and the sign, sometimes a line, more often a figure. Arriving at art at a mature age, Pisano did not allow herself any respite until she had traveled and experienced more roads, attending the Linguistic Academy and putting its teachings and stimuli to good use in an increasingly autonomous and personal way. The result is a multiple journey, in which color has taken on original connotations, in decisive, almost violent tones that recall the works of Mimmo Paladino, while an increasingly original chromaticism lives in her paintings, in which she relives and updates past memories . The sign, not gestural but constructive, is for her the result of an inexhaustible attention to design, with which she carries out a re-appropriation of the everyday world, a chromatically empathic redefinition, which draws on the registers of an interiorly lived reality. She is the sign that controls the outpouring of energy in the vibrant construction of memories, preserving in some works traits of Francis Bacon, but a Bacon of the 21st century, which purifies the expressive urgency in a lean, essential path. Thus a journey from the outside to the inside develops which draws on a gradual simplification, reaching in the most successful works a chromatic material of great fluidity. The figure then becomes a memory, sometimes an evocation of lived or dreamed situations, in which the color is veined with emotions and the sign becomes a trace. Great experimenter, Bernadette Pisano has recently come to work with ceramics, in which she mathematically transposes a propensity for the figure, which in her latest creations evokes works of Art Brut. You have created installations in which paper insertions are dressed in black interventions, mindful of Zen and a complete occupation of space, in a personal horror vacui, composed of successive stratifications. Sign, color, matter are the distinctive traits of an ever evolving research, in an inexhaustible space-time continuum, in which her many passions converge, travel, music, which lead her to look at the world with curious eyes, search for the essence of things. From each new meeting, she Bernadette draws new life to build a path that is full of future developments.
Like the incomparable Muscovite watercolourist Romasko (he is an elegant and discreet person and you won't find him on the internet) he manages with his Windsor & Newton to imitate any technique, so Bernadette Schiaffino Pisano is capable, thanks to an unstoppable vehemence, the result of a dam that has broken upstream and which is called spontaneity, of being liquid like water, rapid, dreamy and descriptive as much that his oil paintings and papers can often be mistaken for watercolors. It's contemporary painting for non-pedant people who don't want to hear too many explanations. Take or leave. This exhibition, composed mainly of studies, of works therefore sketched out, allows us to get to know the soul of the artist, present and protagonist without strategies and pretenses. Let's travel with her to some painting. The Dance recalls the light colors of certain paintings by El Greco, the Sicilian sugar sweets and the glucose sculptures of the Neapolitan pastry shop. It is a Mediterranean world put together and mixed by a Genoese woman. Upside down shows us light people who travel enclosed in other people. They are our guardian angels. These are people who fly without respecting the signs and the rules of the force of gravity. Sometimes, not infrequently, these bodies, these shadows, secretly help someone. Donna is a beautiful and ancient figure in a Parah Olympic costume, observed with a certain intensity by a non-Northern man in an undershirt. The great mother tells of a divinity who is very worried about her children and about the fate of a world in danger. Today's. In the Studies in Indian ink and mixed technique one hears the echo of fluctuating moods. I sleep, reflect and think like a cat in a Chekhov story (Study 14). Here are the blue and pink movements of men and women, random movements, even ancient ones, waste of time in everyone's life. Idleness, father of vices and literature (Study 16). My fear, disturbing writing, appears in an image that is difficult to read like some poems that don't rhyme. Go retro Satan (Study 17). Photo of a mixed high school class, with undisciplined students who move at the moment of the shot (Study 19). Oriental faces. Try to distinguish a Japanese from a Chinese. Past histories, family trees, the city of Kyoto (Study 20). The readers. These are ink and mixed techniques on tracing paper which is like skiing on glass. Without time available, today, to read, newspaper headlines are enough. Warriors go to die sent by others without knowing why. They are very white and often innocent as well. Disorientation is the literary account of something that is about to happen, but we don't want to give a name to everything. It's fourteen thirty. Harem (Studio 9), a group of baby blue women parked in perpetual waiting. Succession, portrait of a dynamism not dissimilar, but more sensual than what can be seen in the first daguerreotypes. Bernadette's eye.
Bernadette Schiaffino Pisano's left-handed stroke runs fast on the sheet. Her main road is that of the sign. A gesture that is not violent but not even controlled. The strokes, whimsical and twisted, like a thousand streams that intertwine, are a thought that melts on the paper. In doing so, the image emerges. Neither defined, nor described; uncontrolled as an idea that crosses the mind cannot be. Pisano's path, which arrives late but with enthusiasm and conviction to the profession of artist, starts from academic study. Within a couple of years or so, she manages to unleash the reins imposed by rigor and craft and understands the need to set aside the numerous variations of pictorial experimentation in homage, more or less obvious and obvious, to the great masters of the color. That is, she understands that color can wander by itself, within those graphic rivulets that her left hand gives to the paper. The description and narration gradually give way to the graphic-pictorial gesture alone, where sign and color merge spontaneously and with a result of great visual as well as emotional effect. It doesn't matter if the faces don't look at us, they don't look at each other. The sense of mutual belonging is equally rendered effectively by the tangling of the bodies. Shapeless shapes, colored or not, guardians of a soul, physical matter that takes on meaning and significance only for this function of protective envelope of something much bigger and immeasurable. The impossibility of measuring translates into the open and fluid structure of the composition that not even large paper seems to be able to suffice. The sense of participation in what one senses happening on the space of the sheet, suitably large for the breath needed for thought, springs within the observer. The viewer is transported not so much into a story, nor into the drama of an apparition, but rather into a fragment of existence. At the center, always the man. Or rather a chorus of people who share an experience, a life. The sacred often emerges as a profoundly human substance of everyone's experience, as a paradigm of a shared feeling. Coral, indeed.
First encounter with the work of Bernadette Pisano, a sophisticated artist of considerable depth, deeply committed to expressive research, which combines figurative representation and gestures ("It's the matter that led me to do"). A few months ago, in her studio: strong emotional impact, dreamlike vision of the universal world of affections, an underground plot of the thick corpus of her works. Martin Kippenberger used to say that an artist has less time than ideas. A river, at its source a torrent full of shapes and colours, poured out without filters, emotions like vibrations of deep sounds perceivable with the hearing of the mind, extended in a vast tonal range: this is the world of Bernadette Pisano. Sometimes seen through a colored fog: looking around between half-closed eyelashes at animated and inanimate objects immersed in a liquid, fluctuating blue-green aquarium light, the promise of a more airy reality sought beyond the doors of the Marzipan Window (2007). Continuous flow, so much goes in so much. Everything is alive and refers to nature, the branches of the trees, the arms, the embrace, even to oneself, in solitude, almost forming a protective shell. Complex speech, that of Bernadette Pisano. We will have to simplify it, creating a sort of Ariadne's thread so as not to get lost in the labyrinth of her overflowing creativity. From sensory pleasure to elaborate ways of searching for meaning, there are many keys to interpreting a work of art, but they all reflect, in addition to the personality and skills of the reader, also the historical context in which they are inscribed, of interaction personal with the world through both conscious and unconscious memories and fantasies. In other words, observation is not enough. Furthermore, while the art-historical context of a work of art is important in appreciating it, it is our knowledge of that history that plays a causal role, producing the experience itself. Memories, therefore semantic memories about historical circumstances, but also episodic memories, that is, of our life, including our personal relationships with art. And then, even our mental representations contribute to the understanding of the emotions conveyed by the work. It is perceived with body and mind, just as the artist creates with body and mind. From this daring marriage emerges, especially in the more recent works, a particular dynamic painting, in some ways a filiation of Expressionism and in others of the New Objectivity, revisited with human participation, with less cold observational detachment than, so to speak, to an Otto Dix. Certain Studies from 2010-2013 reactivate lumps of anguish from Munch's The Scream ("Painting is not only what is visible to the eye, but also includes the internal images of the soul"); the crude denunciation of all forms of enslavement unites the artist to the tragic world of George Grosz. Ours will therefore be an attempt to visit Bernadette Pisano's work "from within" and at the same time historically, obviously not a reading of the internal world of the woman Bernadette, which belongs to her private sphere, but a follow of the structural and evolutionary story formal of the artist. Therefore immediate enjoyment of the strong aesthetic impact, the result of a particular significance of the colors, absolutely original by the artist, and of the design system, rooted in the current historical-artistic context. And then, a deeper understanding that is not easy, which requires a historical-psychological approach to the work. The flow set in motion by the artist, pre-sighted like all true artists, flows through the medium color ink brush pen paper canvas cardboard ceramic, guiding his hand in a largely unaware way. Letting ourselves be carried away, round after round, we will land on new shores and unsuspected paths of further knowledge. Extraordinary endless journey: Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, (2013). To make the process of knowing the work more accessible to us, not inspired by Apollo, a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm: Hansel and Gretel will be useful as a frame of reference. It will introduce us, through the dream of the child soul, into the primitive dark meanders of human existence, a universal and shared story that has to do with oral greed. To orient us, our north star, less at risk than Hansel's bread crumbs, will be the Marzipan Window (2007), emblematically placed in the middle of the road (2003-2007/2008-2013), a prelude to entering the world of 'autonomy (La Stazione, 2009), out of the maternal earthly paradise of oral gratification-gingerbread house, which sometimes reveals itself as deprivation, abandonment, solitude and even captivity. The journey towards integration is tiring, sometimes agonizing, some never reach the goal. Fuga dall'esca mortifera (2003-2011) - Passing through seductive but languishing presences, devoid of lifeblood (Natura morta, 2003, and those that will follow), always in search of a profound dialogue (Alberi di Sardegna, 2004), the artist introduces us into a cold, false empty space, where an inanimate and mutilated, uber-femininity is sterilely proposed (Immobilibilità, 2006), or a glittering display of mellow colors he takes pleasure in an unattainable beauty (Still life with bottle, 2006). Anthropological affair lived by many, once like today. Metaphor of these deprived beings, the garden which, in its trusting innocence (again the artist puts white in the foreground, a neutral color which, however, in these contexts, takes on an aseptic, cold value), awaits the rain (Giardino prima of the rain, 2006). Nature, not nourished by warm affection and relegated to an area once again of pure exhibition, no longer has anything welcoming: the glasses are too big on stems that are too thin, too fragile to contain anything in themselves, if not the 'admiration of the beholder (Calle, 2007): mirroring that gives nothing but a mutual reassurance of one's own beauty and perfection. It is interesting to note that what the artist is showing us with great objectivity is even more underlined, by contrast, by Bernadette Pisano's technique and by the spirit that animates it, absolutely at the antipodes of exhibition, of the emptiness of affections and of escaping the dialogue. The original couple is proposed once again not in its entirety, but reduced to partial objects (see the unconscious fantasy that guides the artist in the metaphor of the garlic-feminine and the asparagus-masculine), inscribing itself in the circle of the infinite still lifes (2007-2011) with sometimes mournful colors (Still life with garlic and asparagus, 2007). Partial objects, confused in shapeless and anonymous urban waste, do not narrate any story in which a living person could wish to be included (Natura morta, 2007). Thus, step by step, with sometimes imperceptible micro-variations, the artist is bringing us closer to the heart of the story: how will we be able to get out of the narrow crack and the "marzipan house-maternal body" with which the witch tries to attract the children - children, voracious victims, to then devour them in turn? Note how the lower right part of the curtain that frames the Marzipan Window anticipates the curl of Mamma (2008) in form and functionality, at the same time enclosing-imprisoning an almost invisible figure who would like to slip unseen from the half-closed windows: it is truly the unconscious that guides Pisano's hand here. How will Hansel and Gretel find the strength to break out of the tempting prison? And once outside, what will they find? Again rejection, loneliness and abandonment, after an illusory first warm embrace still unaware of separation and desire? It won't be long, and the artist's unconscious, continuing his discourse on universal suffering, will reveal to us that the sweet and the beautiful often turn out to be toxic. And with that, we have entered another artistic season, an important artistic moment, a prelude to the lighter and more aerial phase of the work. Prelude and Beginning of Appeasement (2008-2011) - We had left Hansel and Gretel as they were plotting to escape. Universal situation, who doesn't run away from someone or something? And to escape, everyone develops their own strategies. You can close every opening to the outside, the gaze fixed and empty turned inward, and life unfolds in an interiority largely unconscious of oneself. Perhaps, suggests the artist with the delicate touch of the brush, almost dipped in the air, to escape the deadly grip you need to become souls (Anime, 2008). While the body remains on the scene, a false presence, the absence reveals itself as a defense against capture and imprisonment, and secretly allows the soul, light and impalpable, to slip out of the window in search of freedom. Or, gradually, the body becomes marbled in vainly coveted colors-affections, and is incarnated in hard stones and sculptural forms, cold to the touch; arms and hands become useless appendages, there is no contact. Conversely, but nothing substantially changes, rotting fruits, cruelly cut flowers and goblets full of improbable liquids agonize on soft warm pillows, in the most total abandonment and solitude (Natura morta, 2008). The hungry body, almost lifeless, is a puppet, an adult projection of Hansel, who has not been able to escape the voracity of the witch (Mistrust, 2008), whose sweet offerings of luminous rosy icing (Still Life, 2009) will reveal so many traps. The dim light of a candle will soon be extinguished. In darkness and solitude (Ombra1 and Ombra2, 2009) old ghosts of imprisonment, constriction, separation, emptiness without a foothold re-emerge (square furniture, full of edges, hands that tower over like hooked pincers, to be rendered inert and therefore powerless. A contact deadly, mechanical, cold and implacable). Therefore the body must be alienated, closed and protected (La japanese, 2009), unfathomable, unknown, incommunicable. The shadow envelops everything, soon it will be dark, and the anguish is greater. Only the foreigner (Lo Spagnolo, 2009; and then Morocchino, 2010), opening a glimpse into the imaginary, appears to be the bearer of the possibility of warm relationships, precisely because he belongs to "another world", foreign and separate from the domestic one. Almost stolen imaginary, like during a sleep (Nudo, 2009), without the other - the outside, the stranger - being aware of it. At this point, leaving becomes a categorical imperative. The station (2009) marks a fundamental moment of transition towards the identification of the Self: once they have exited the Window, and acquired tools of knowledge, the female travellers, with only the slim suitcase that contains them, are ready to embark on the journey. The work also stylistically embodies a founding moment in Bernadette Pisano's artistic career, with an absolutely original cut of the shot and the basic essential colors that we will find in her most recent works. The impact in solitude with the outside is hard. Cold bare nature, emptiness punctuated by rigid strings of light, no possibility of a welcoming and safe nest, only the feathers, to blend in with dry leaves so that the last shot of the last hunter does not catch, helpless (Solo sparrow, 2010). Will we have to lock ourselves up once again in anonymous squared cells and become mute and lifeless mannequins again (Riquadri, 2010)? And here is The Fish Woman (2010), who knows where her soul is, left her body lying there as a sign of false presence, she sails immersed in the liquid aquarium, the green-blue light of a dream; her nipple, illusorily alive, blooms sterile on a marble breast. The soul can only dream (see the stupendous oneiric series of the Venices, 2010), but she does not dare to show her inner world otherwise than with a marbled affective tone of color (Self-portrait 1 and 2, 2010). Warm reverberations of the luminosity of nature illuminate dull gazes at life, like cut flowers full of sunset, they delude about an interiority that does not reveal itself, and perhaps has already been swallowed up by eternal darkness (Natura morta, 2011). Paradoxically, the cemetery (Cimiteri, 2011) becomes the place, the only possible one, to escape the deadly embraces, and if at first it evokes the torments and wounds of the soul, then everything is transformed into the exact opposite, and the affections, a somewhat maniacal, they emerge overwhelmingly conveyed by bold colors, far from the pinks, blues, greens that express the most peculiar aspects of the artist's spirituality. Nature welcomes and pacifies the wandering soul, almost a prelude to the Crucifixion of 2013. Reflection. Going with the flow. Pacification (2012-2013) - Starting from 2012, the last defensive barriers having fallen under the flood of affections, the flow of emotion abandons its karst path and begins to flow freely, showing itself on the surface. Then the artist stops on its banks and reflects. He seeks and finds containment in the graphic sign, almost calligraphic, in the sense of personal handwriting, which springs from within, not learned, therefore reflects what one is, and no longer inescapable echoes of encounters made along the path of formation. The research assumes the consistency of an almost monastic discipline of self-containment. The figures stand out surrounded by black or white, sum of every color: "It is the material that carries me, the graphic sign, figure, body, makes me free, my personal figure that is inside me." In reducing, it is the synthetic function of the ego that asserts itself overwhelmingly and dominates the latest works that represent a more mature fruit of Bernadette Pisano's research. The sign has become color in the sense of internal emotional liberation, which also translates into a lightness of the medium, no longer pasty oil, but ink, chalk, tempera, watercolor. Emotionality can be expressed with that, as with a poem or a note, it is a great enrichment, a conquered inner freedom. One is no longer overwhelmed, everything is more modulated, one can stand up, reflect, dialogue, but without constrictive ties: the body rises again, free, dressed in colors as light as the air (Studio 06, 2012), one breathes deeply lungs the oxygen of freedom (Boy with a straw hat, 2012), up to the summit of the liberating jubilation of shapes and colors of the Studio for installation 11 (2012). Open Sesame! And the Cave of the 40 thieves, with its treasures that with the opulence of their colors sing a hymn to life, once acquired the magic formula to access them, offers our eyes full of wonder a wealth accumulated over time, who would have ever imagined? The first image, the peacock, introduces us to this segment, fresh, spontaneous and at the same time multifaceted and continually to be discovered, of Bernadette Pisano's artistic career, which is presented under the sign of an exceptional solar fertility (Studies for installation, 01 , 2012). Here is the prickly pear unfolding in all its beauty, eternal fruit that survives in conditions of extreme deprivation in the driest soils, to then explode in the splendor of its red, yellow, orange and green buds ( Studies for installation, 02, 05, 06, 08, 11. 2012). It is a group of emotionally very vibrant works, in which a perceptible affectivity flows from the observer to the work and vice versa. The works of 2013 created so far seem to mark an arrest (or should we consider it an evolution?) compared to the sparkling and lively flood that characterized the artist's production in the previous months. But no natural path is linear, we go forward but then we can go back, and then take yet another road, perhaps secondary and almost hidden compared to the one followed up to a moment before, and all this, if we know how to read it in depth , has its own coherence, if it is not the result of a forcing, and it may happen that we understand it much later, just as the Nazca lines are legible only if seen from a considerable distance, from above, while the admirable eludes us design and the overall meaning if we look only at our feet, dusty ground trampled by thousands of pilgrims and strewn with seemingly insignificant pebbles. The good-natured man in the Portrait, 2013 seems to slowly move away, taking away with him the magic of the vibrant colors of the Installation Studios. The artist experiences a withdrawal into herself (Studio 16) passing through a very delicate Crucifixion, the face of Christ barely touched by the crown of thorns, a soul at peace among evanescent souls that make the surrounding void more human, inhabited only by dead trees, a memory of a dead past time, while what the artist calls his colors of spirituality hover, the pinks and blues that erase the blood spilled and the agony of an innocent death. The soul rises again, lives, is alive and imbues itself with the last vestiges of death, betrayal, loneliness, abandonment, anguish. It is no longer necessary to proclaim it aloud, to overflow it, as in the immediately preceding works. Even the faces of the Two worlds apart (2013) are pacified with the very fluidization of the more full-bodied medium, oil. The pastel emptiness behind the woman introduces spaces unthinkable until recently, almost radiant, in which the artist seems to reappropriate the air, which enters caressing and fresh, defining the space at the very moment in which it fills it with an impalpable nothingness, in which the soul, finally free and peaceful, enjoys.