calendario eventi  :: 

X

9/3/2005

Adria Sartori

KvadraT Gallery, St. Petersburg

Flowing with Elisabeth Siddal

Amazingly young as she is, the Italian artist Adria Sartore is quite a well-known figure within a wide circle of art collectors. Famous as a copyist, having won glory for the so-called Vrubel Case — her work «Pan's Head» was deemed to have been painted by Michael Vrubel himself, — she did fall under the spell of the Vrubel myth in which art and life are fancifully entwined.

Today, Adria is in quest of her own style; having surpassed all fastidious copyists, she has developed a peculiar idiom by employing the techniques of old Italian masters, yet each time probing into new subjects.
For some years now, she has been painting portraits. One of these series was devoted to Ellen, a young English girl living in Genoa. The pictures are tiny, 20 x 23 cm each, and owing to the delicateness of technique they resemble miniature painting. With the exception that her approach to image is different. Sometimes the face takes up practically all space within the rigid frames, sometimes she takes interest only in a fragment, which makes them look like a desert and reminds one of mysterious jewels of golden sands.
At times, the space of the picture telescopes, the image recedes, and a tiny portrait of a fragile and vulnerable little girl looks like an impression on a rock. Though the artist is interested in one and the same person, it is neither the state he is in nor psychology, but something altogether different. While so far critics have classed portraits in accordance with psychological, biographical and representational principles, Sartore's portraits defy classification. Each of her portraits seems to possess the author's blood. Her works are a keen contemplation of her own self. The model becomes a mirror into which the artist peers closely. Maybe that is why the actual model was so reluctant to sit for her. Could it be that she simply failed to recognize herself in each portrait?
Accomplished and highly realistic as they are, her works cause deep anguish that comes from the inability to fathom a mystery.
Her latest series of portraits made in the winter of 2004–05 bears a name of «Elizabeth Siddal».
While the colour array in the pictures of the previous cycle is radiant yellow ochre, here the colour changes radically to build on juxtapositions of cold pearl-white colours and the transparency of white, green and thin, almost whitened, beige warm tints.
No more intent inward gazing through the posing model, as was typical of portraits from the previous series, here is the artist who ardently stands up to the detachment of the captured reality, as if everything that is happening happens beyond the looking glass and requires no sympathy. Every small-sized piece treats one and the same subject — a fair maid or a princess floating in a pool of water. But for the notorious detachment, coldness and elevation of the very moment, as well as the perception of reality as a dream, the works of this cycle may be well treated from the point of view of modernist tendency. Far from that.
Once, when deliberating over reality in modern art, Picasso noted, «It is not the reality that you can touch. It is sooner a fragrance which envelopes you from behind, from the front and from your sides. The fragrance is everywhere, though you fail to trace its origin». The special reality embodied in her works feels like an innuendo. Elaborately painted recurrent details and multi-layered painting prove not only to be a self-sufficient valuable surface, but also serve as the aesthetic tool of doubling premeditated death. Every time the artist starts mystifying while reproducing the situation, as if carried away playing the part of Ophelia, she nears the truth of the imagery. It is because of a series of sacrifices that the represented death or, rather, its perception, is doubled in one's imagination to manifest the author's outlook and her weird aesthetics of gratification. This death sooner reminds us of a ritual that we come to witness, and it is subversive. By performing it in accordance with its own laws and procedure, the artist's consciousness condemns her ambience and changes all established and existing norms. Only flirting with death, even if it is not what is actually happening, can elicit the function of death, which is an inalienable part of the whole universe. By inviting a violent death the artist strikes out the question of her «natural immortality». Indeed, «this last subterfuge, the last craft of »her own self« results in extremes — in the search of an »absurd death« to save the principle of her immortality„. Fearing in earnest of the oblivion that Brecht wrote about in a song,
«It so happened that the Lord has finally forgotten her, at first her face, then hands and hair…»,
the artist came up with this frighteningly realistic ritual peculiar to the series as an attempt to announce herself again and again. As if gone through the looking-glass, to the realm of dreams and persistent experience, mysteriously and sadly, she weaves her story about herself and for herself. That is why every canvas with its pure glimmering colours and its ideally executed images leaves us in the darkness, disturbs our consciousness and eludes understanding.
The images in the works of this cycle vaguely remind one of a series of documentary photographs taken during these rituals. The faces, once acquiring the expression of detachment, stay unchanged. In my opinion, the most interesting work in this series is the portrait which vividly shows the nature, horror and rejection of this protracted flirtation with death. This is one of the works in which metaphysical realism with all the mysteries and romantic detachments disappears like reflected light to give way to the direct speech of the artist. It rallies all sufferings, fears, exhaustion of a person who has stepped into the next century and is living in a new disorderly time, which he is absolutely incapable of understanding.

www.adriasartore.com

KvadraT Gallery
Kuibysheva Street, 28 - St. Petersburg

stampa

permanent link