SENZA TITOLO

Untitled, 200 cm x 35 cm, Monotype on canvas, 2010

These works are created using the monotype technique or by attaching tree bark to the canvas. The artist also employs colour chalcography technology, using her own fingers to impress the theme upon the canvas. The meeting of the skin of the tree and the skin of the artist results in a poetic symbiosis of the human and the natural, in which the artistic object loses every stroke of artificiality.

The skin of the trees

The images that make up the monotype come from the iconographic synthesis of the imprints of the vertical shafts and the cross-sections of the logs. The viewer is thus first struck by the verisimilitude, which is borne of the natural dimensions of the logs and the “vivacity” of the bark. At the same time, the placing of the cuts at the ends of the logs elicits a distorting and alienating effect on the perspective. The boundaries between “nature” and “art” become almost imperceptible: is it nature that bursts on to the canvas and demands to be listened to? Or is it the canvas that harnesses the living object, forcing it to meet the reflective gaze of the viewer? In this process of identity assignment, the artist is merely a mute instrument, transmitting  a dialogue that is out of her hands.

Sliding fabric

For the composition of the work, the artist chooses to remove the paintings from their frames, after having previously treated them with traditional primer. This detachment can be viewed as a liberation of the matter from all that the forces it into rigid institutional patterns; thus it becomes a path that leads to the fluidity of nature, which leads in turn to the creation of a direct monotype, in which the support, now rollable and fluent, placidly adheres to the bark of the trees.

Exhibition mode

Monotyped directly on to the canvas, these prints have been exhibited in different ways and in different locations. The “mobility” of the canvases makes them adaptable to their environment, so they can be left to blow in the wind like drying clothes, or they can be shown lying on the ground, like skins left out to dry.