Educational Tours:
We organize performances for you at home and abroad. Just have a look
at our offers … here
"What is Culture? This topic can be found ... here!"
Art speaks its
own universal language and in Italy, with unbroken artistic tradition,
artistic heritage is everywhere. Thus, the contemporary artist has
a treasure trove of images and meanings at hand and yet, a key often
helps to read and understand the contemporary message. Sandra Rigali's
project features an image for each of the year's 12 months. This reminds
one of the centuries-old tradition of depicting productive activities
on cathedral facades, one for each of the year's twelve months as,
for example, on the façade of San Martino in Lucca. Toils monumentalized
in stone convey the message that lives spent gaining nature's riches
are part of a divine order. The Project of Sandra is a cycle of revolving
interplay between woman's existence, her work and her environment.
She adopts the expression, "A Room of One's Own" as coined
by the English author, Virginia Woolf (1929), not as a feminist battle
cry, but rather as an expression of the woman artist's birthright
to create and her legitimate need for the conditions that will allow
her to bloom. The woman artist needs her own space, real and mental,
a space of freedom. Through the freedom of art, Sandra Rigali creates
her own space, truly a "Room of One's Own".
WEIGHT
OF THE WORLD
Though
oft said that there is nothing new under the sun, even as newness
of life is real, true art is newness of perception. At first
view, Rigali's paintings appear classical, informed by female
beauty, balance and harmony. The idealized female body has been
an element in our western visual memory at least since the ancient
Greeks, and Rigali's renderings inform a very personal figural
aesthetic in a constant and beautiful manner. Her work adds
new life to the truism that the female nude never ceases to
fascinate. Standing, reclining, arching, crouching as in the
WEIGHT OF THE WORLD or sitting, her females, often nude, are
in their own universe. Each betrays a loving view of its being,
rightly to be compared with the light hearted admiring male
gaze of a Matisse, or to the passionate self view of a Frieda
Kahlo.
But
here resemblance ends, as Rigali's figures hark from a universe
of her own. Their expressive glances with wide open or tightly
shut eyes shout happy contentment, or questioning, or longing,
or silence, or withdrawal. Often the position and rendering
of the figure is the expression, with outline ranging from fine
contour to thick colored line, from corporeal plasticity of
classical substance to a Matisse-like linear sign as is ODALISCACONLIMONI.
For all their differences, her figures reveal tenderness, love,
and yes, commitment to femaleness.
ODALISCACONLIMONI
It would be an
omission to note only the harmony and well-being evident in Regali's
work, for although she features all the traditional elements and attributes
of women's art - luminous flowers, sensuous fruit - Regali's art doesn't
allow for smug comfort. Rather, it lets the world's mixed messages
intrude on self-absorption. Her creations betray a searching artistic
temperament with all its disturbances and clashes as the non-ideal
world with its challenges seeps in to her refuge. The world and its
messages thus enter and become part of the artist's world. An intuitive
creative process is alive and at work, rendered by a uniquely individual
hand. Using mixed media, she applies paper to the prepared canvas
to yield a patterning of folds, ridges and planes that will underlie
her finished paintings, with the result that her finished images preserve
something spontaneous and unplanned and in their stillness, retain
energy of creation. Sometimes the paper carries texts, and often fields
of color overlap the patterning. This technique bears testimony that
verisimilitude is not the artist's aim, but rather, the creation of
a unique reality.
DALLMIASTANZA
Such magical
reality is immediately visible in Regali's landscapes, where
shapes and colors flow from artistic impulses. DALLMIASTANZA.
One feels life's energy in her paintings showing Garfagnana's
ancient stone homes twisted on their foundations and magnificent
landscapes and in some examples re-inventing their horizons.
They seem to be in uproar, and yet in balance through composition
using fields of color in vibrant relationship. Her secure sense
of color values and shades seem to flow from intuition. Objects
seem to follow their own artistic laws and imbue the images
with harmony and peace.
In
MY THEATRE one finds an example of Rigali's introducing subtle
disturbances to add complexities that animate harmonious space.
The entire scene seems to spill forward, toward the viewer,
in a spirit of generosity. The red curtains are parted, inviting
the viewer's gaze to enter a world. It is a private space, a
table with a vase that holds bright yellow sunflowers, an empty
coffee cup on a book and Sandra's calling card, a classical
nude on a panel that at times comes from her memory and not
from a model. One sees a masterful interplay of shapes and bright
complementary colors, an interplay between the public and the
private. The red curtains hang in perpendicular planes, the
left reaching forward to convey a "reaching out" while
the right conveys a more secret, mysterious "inviting in".
MY
THEATRE
PENSEUSE
NEOMI
It
needs to be emphasized that Rigali is a bold and superb colorist.
Indeed, her colors may be seen as their own abstract creations
(have an own abstract identity) even without any relation to
the objective world. Thick layers of color enhance intriguing
textures, tempting one to touch and feel, to discover their
message through the tactile sense. Each painting is a celebration
of color with visual feasts of blues, reds, greens and yellows,
the more stunning through the discipline and clarity seen in
their usage to form planes of interlocking shapes that delight
the eye. Blue under her brush triumphs in various shades as
in the PENSEUSE. Let the eye linger a bit on the triad of clear
blues and lilac planes in NEOMI and notice the energy in their
juxtaposition. The way three planes meet to form a corner make
a fascinating focal point to create a committed space to be
inhabited by the artist's evocative figure. In its clarity and
abstraction the space contrasts with the young willowy woman,
the firey pattern of her dress and the glowing sunflower that
she holds. Life and abstraction, figure and space thus set in
subtle tension are superb example of what Rigali means with
the expression, "a room of one's own". Using shades
of color to enhance geometric depth, her painting creates imaginative
mental depth.
In
TOMMASO, the standing adolescent boy is set firmly in a room,
beside a seat with his head framed tightly by paintings, Sandra's
"toils", that are cut away by the frame. Here, the
color red is the artistic element that links and animates the
painting's various features, as it surrounds the boy's shiningly
new shirt, contradicts the composition's strictness and darkens
the plush upholstery (poltrone). The boy's blue-white stripes
militate against the red and divide the painting horizontally.
One senses boldness in tension with compositional discipline,
especially in the adolescent rigidity of the boy's hands which
is softened by the warmth of color. This example of Rigali's
security of composition conveys the immediacy of a mother's
love and her concern for a secure place of the adolescent boy.
TOMMASO
ODALISCACONLIMONI
UNA
STANZA TUTTA PER ME
Contemporary
life no longer requires most of us to labor at agriculture,
as was the case when cathedrals were built. Although we have
lost close connection to the land, we still discern the passage
of time through gradations of mood as the months pass in their
yearly cycle. Sandra Rigali's cycle of paintings likewise progresses
with cool to warm colors -see ODALISCACONLIMONI and UNA STANZA
TUTTA PER ME - and moods ranging from introspective stillness
to openness to the outside world. Rigali's art shows a mature
consistency and a mastery of relationships between figures,
objects and space. Each painting communicates shades of mood
and life's experience. In her consummately feminine way, she
balances openness and restraint, allowing intuition to guide
her craft, with the result that all her artistic elements join
in a dance of celebration of beauty. Life and movement and the
miracle of color are the very tokens of her art.
WEIGHT
OF THE WORLD
