"Si può essere contemporanei dipingendo un giardino. La pittura è contemporanea quando ci riguarda da vicino. Tutta l'arte è attuale se parla di noi, se ci sfiora, ci rappresenta. Non è questione di modi, ma di vocazione. Quello che Brigitta Rossetti fa con la pittura di natura è utilizzare un genere antico – che affonda fino alla pittura murale nel giardino lussureggiante della Casa del bracciale d'oro di Pompei – per narrare necessità attuali. Spinte antropologiche. Come il bisogno quanto mai odierno (post pandemico) di riconnettersi col cosmo, di dare un valore al silenzio, di ritrovare nella solitudine la dimensione mistica del senso. Per questo Brigitta parla di “rifugi”, come luoghi dell'accoglienza, di una individualità forte, spazio di riconnessione dell'uomo con se stesso e, allo stesso tempo, col creato.
Ricercare l'equilibrio nella forma è l'esito di una meditazione, di un percorso esoterico, di un raccoglimento. Lo faceva Cézanne nelle sue lunghe passeggiate attraversi i campi della Provenza prima di ritornare allo studio e scomporre il paesaggio nella griglia regolare della geometria. Lo avrebbe rifatto, con altro linguaggio ma uguale attitudine, Giovanni Anselmo nel 1971 con la sua storica azione Entrare nell'opera e l'obiettivo puntato su una prateria attraverso la quale l'artista camminò, qualificando il suo scatto e, insieme, il suo “esserci” dentro. E, ancora, Robert Smithson per spiegare l'origine della sua celebre Spiral Jetty, non a caso srotolata sulla West Coast degli Stati Uniti all'alba degli anni Settanta, scrisse: «Mentre lo contemplavo, il luogo riverberò sull'orizzonte come un ciclone immobile e l'intero paesaggio sembrò vacillare nella vibrazione della luce. Un terremoto latente si scatenò in una immensa curva. Da questo spazio vorticoso emerse la possibilità dello Spiral Jetty, del molo a spirale. Nessuna idea, nessun concetto, nessun sistema, nessuna struttura, nessuna astrazione poteva far fronte alla realtà di questa evidenza fenomenologica». Brigitta sceglie fortissimamente la pittura, ma abbraccia la stessa ispirazione. E incorpora nelle sue tele monumentali il respiro dell'universo, il battito della terra. Le sue visioni si accendono sotto la superficie di umori quiescenti, segreti selvatici. L’intensità e l’estensione, la dimensione spazio-temporale tipica dell’atto pittorico, entrano così stabilmente nel bagaglio esistenziale di Brigitta, tanto quanto la linfa energetica della dimensione fisica che la vede aderire col corpo alla tela stesa al suolo e cedere ai modi della pittura e a quella famosa “volontà del colore” che passa da uno stato di complicità a una estenuante, febbrile contesa, accesa di colpi, brividi, pause, affondi. Eccitando i turgori della materia, Brigitta alza la posta nel momento esatto in cui l'orizzonte l'avvolge fino a farle smarrire il sentiero, i punti di riferimento nello spazio. Quel cespuglio così famigliare all'angolo del roseto ha cambiato colore e dimensione. È trasfigurato. È altrove. L'estetica del labirinto prevale sulla sicurezza del giardino. Lo stagno è una laguna del cuore. Il canneto, un altro confine da varcare. Un repertorio di citazioni, che vanno da De Staël a Novelli a Twombly guida i suoi passi cauti dove l'orientamento si perde. Il colore è una bussola. Il colore semina indizi. Il viraggio verde-azzurro de Il sole invisibile indica smottamenti su un terreno zuppo di pioggia. L'umidità viaggia sottopelle. Per via di sensi e di emozioni, Brigitta procede fra colline naturali, limiti continui che lo sguardo rivendica. La stesura si fa magra, senza spessori, cretti o spaccature; nega la sostanza corporea all’immagine e afferma un effetto opalescente, un’epifania, un'apparizione, dove i rapporti fra spazio e forma si risolvono, a questo punto, nella luce."
Estratto del libro Natural seeing a cura di Chiara Gatti - Storica dell’arte e curatrice
“Il vero viaggio di scoperta non consiste nel cercare nuove terre,
ma nell’avere nuovi occhi” ”
(Marcel Proust)
La Recherche di Brigitta Rossetti, per dirla con lo scrittore francese Marcel Proust, è legata alla potenza espressiva delle sue originali e complesse trame e alle minuziose descrizioni dei processi interiori legati al ricordo, al sentimento umano e al proscenio su cui tutto avviene; la sua Recherche, infatti, è un viaggio metaforico che si insinua nel tempo e nella memoria e che si snoda agile all'interno di una struttura sintattica composta essenzialmente da una grazia clemente e da stratificazioni veementi, la cui trama si concentra a grandi linee su un io narrante, il quale richiede fortemente da un lato una grandissima capacità analitica e dall’altro l’esaltazione delle forme intuitive di conoscenza del mondo e di interiorità dell’essere umano.
Mediante l'utilizzo di smalti, acrilici, carte assorbenti, tessuti, tecniche miste e di integrazione di materiali di diversa natura, tra gli altri, sia nelle opere pittoriche sia in quelle installative, Rossetti è alla continua ricerca di un equilibrio tra figurazione ed astrazione, crocevia creativo in cui l'artista stessa si regala la possibilità di approfondire la definizione di spazio e il rapporto che intercorre tra il medesimo e l’opera d’arte. Si tratta di una creatività artistica di matrice allegoricamente odeporica, in cui coabitano una certa oggettività razionale, cosmopolita, naturalistica e antropocentrica, e una maggiore emotività e soggettività dei moti dell'animo.
Visionaria e poliedrica, Brigitta Rossetti nasce nella campagna piacentina dove tuttora vive e lavora, nel suo atelier che è stato ricavato da un vecchio fienile: mucche al pascolo, campi di grano, alberi secolari e manifestazioni cromatiche naturali sono solo alcuni degli elementi peculiari che costituiscono lo scenario prolifico in cui tutto si genera.
L’infinitamente grande e l’infinitamente piccolo, l’importanza sia degli elementi naturali sia di quelli magici, la poesia, l’incontro con l’assoluto, l'onirico, le descrizioni sugli aspetti sociali e storico-culturali dei luoghi visitati e delle genti incontrate, sono solo alcune delle tematiche a lei care, tanto da consentirle di parlarci di avventure, esplorazioni e scoperte, quasi sempre adornate da sfumature di carattere bucolico e paesaggistico dal sapore romanzesco, «per quelli di dovunque che però si sentivano abbastanza giovani per rimanere curiosi del mondo*».”
*Ryszard Kapuściński - «Polish chronicler of Third World Kapuscinski», in Reuters UK, 23 gennaio 2007
Domenico De Chirico - Curator e Art editor
Progetto: La Recherche
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
(Albert Einstein)
An artist's biography somehow eventually influences his or her works, which is what naturally and invariably happens for all creative processes. It is actually impossible for our psychological and emotional life experience not to leave clear marks on the creation of images which, after all, are the result of the projection of any individual being and of their peculiar way of processing and representing reality.
As for Brigitta Rossetti, the autobiographical tendency is an essential element of her artistic creativity. It is a necessary, although not sufficient condition, to explain the branching off of her visual thoughts.
The writer and poet Rainer Maria Rilke claimed that “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism”. Such a statement is particularly relevant when we consider the output of an artist withdrawn into his/her own shell and reluctant to come to terms with the expectations and pressures of the surrounding society.
Unlike any such artist, Brigitta Rossetti has developed a marked sensitivity towards contemporary society and, especially in the past few years, she has been trying to find a way to let her personal experience be tuned within the wider context of general matters. Through her works she has painstakingly endeavoured to investigate the complex relationship existing between man and the environment which, incidentally, seems to be on the verge of a dangerous condition of deterioration and imbalance. Brigitta Rossetti's approach actually develops out of a mere biographical event: her studio is situated inside a former hayloft which has been turned into a residence at the heart of the countryside in the province of Piacenza.
The landscape, therefore, with its endless variety of shapes and hues, provides a natural setting for the artist's aesthetic reflections. What she can see day by day is not just what influences her perception of reality, but it also forcefully pours into her artistic technique, which resorts to the use of organic matter, of salvaged artifacts and household objects.
Actually, Ms Rossetti's research originates from the combination of the matter-of-fact simplicity of daily life with its unsophisticated gestures, habits and tools, with the lyrical and titanic prospect of reconstructing the fundamental human values within the frame of a society that seems to be speedily heading towards the opposite destination of natural order.
What characterises her works, based on various means and media and ranging from painting to sculpture, from artistic installations to videos, is the use of retrieval materials such as pieces of wood, old ladders, mirrors, printed pages from books, chairs, as well as such organic matter as earth, stones, logs and leaves, which recall an immediate link with nature.
Brigitta Rossetti's works are above all characterised by a lyrical, elegiac inspiration, influenced by the rhythms and inflection of poetry as well as by a romantic cluster of imagery indeterminately suspended between the appeal of abstract art and the allure of symbolism.
It is painting, with frequent contaminations from sculpture and artistic installations aimed at widening its expressive potential in a three-dimensional, environmental-friendly perspective, that constitutes the leading thread of the artist's research. Those paintings are, however, distant from descriptive, camouflage stylistic features but are rather constructed to start from the idea of a progressive stratification of signs and gestures aimed at faithfully recording the process of metabolic fusion of inner and outward reality, of observation of phenomena and emotional experience. That is the key to fully understand the implications of Brigitta Rossetti's works. In many of her compositions the painting technique is combined with ready-made materials in order to create an oleographic fragment of the natural world, which is capable of including both a fanciful projection of the environment and its physical, concrete reconstruction.
Campo arato (The ploughed field), for instance, is an installation including a pictorial work made with kitchen paper, acrylic paints and pigments as well as an object trouvé and an organic element. A fragrant streak of dark earth links the canvas to two small white painted ploughs, thus producing a sort of three-dimensional allegory of the creation. The canvas represents the untended field to be metaphorically ploughed by the artist with the tools of technique and imagination.
A similar modus operandi can be spotted in the Paesaggio quasi bianco (Virtually white landscape), consisting of a painting set on top of an old wooden ladder which gives the illusion of looking at a snow-capped view through a dormer or attic window. The painting becomes once again the object of a personal journey of discovery, the revelation of an unexpected event. It is not by chance that Brigitta Rossetti considers art in general, and painting in particular, not just as the result of a predetermined project, but rather as a wandering course where surprises and unexpected discoveries are likely to occur. Many solutions chosen by the artist are actually the consequence of a series of intuitions that come to light when the works are in progress, just when the original idea and project are aided by flashes of inspiration and by the strokes of practical skill. Such sudden inspiration may be kindled by the recovery of special objects or the recycling of waste materials that acquire fresh, new life for the artist. In the works entitled Cielo e non altro (Nothing but sky) and Ave Maria (Hail Mary) the kitchen paper is used to turn the painting surface into crêpe paper and create a mixture of colours and pigments that shatters the traditional two-dimensional boundaries of painting. However, in Sogni di Pietra (Stone Dreams), a wall installation with twenty-two small-size paintings, the ready-made has a prominent ecological connotation. The props on which Rossetti outlines her fragments of landscape are special pads generally used to soak up toxic sewage. It is as by a sort of alchemic process that the artist turns poisonous waste which would require very special disposal into an aesthetic artifact meant to inspire a message of hope. The theme of reconciliation with nature actually underpins all the artistic creation of Ms Rossetti. This is particularly true if we think of her Children's Garden or of the Reflection series, where the representation of huge, imaginary flowers is a sort of invitation to reflect on the fragility and uncertainty of natural stability. In both series the paintings are combined with retrieval materials such as children's chairs and old mirrors, which are meant to provide a background context for the visionary painting.
In Children’s Garden nature is considered an inspirational place for children, whom it can help develop a civil and moral conscience, whereas in Reflection nature is seen as a space inspiring contemplation. When mirrored in the metaphorical water puddle set at the foot of the painting, the spectators acquire awareness of belonging to the same environment that they so unwittingly contribute to destroy. This is in full contrast with the myth of Narcissus, i.e. the condemnation of the terrible consequences that the ecosystem is bound to suffer because of man's unbounded selfishness, which we can also find in the alienating sequence of reflective surfaces of Mirrors.
Crossing is an artistic achievement which clearly mirrors the imbalance of contemporary civilization. It is an installation consisting of two distinct elements: a wall sculpture made with cardboard tubes bound to be dumped and the projection of a video shot in the streets of Taiwan. The organ, with its reference to the tradition of sacred music, is a remainder of the sounds that usually accompany prayer and contemplation and also revives the memory of the slowly paced ancestral life. “It is the silence of the wide spaces of the countryside that surrounds me”, Brigitta Rossetti explains, “which revives age-old traditions such as the evening tales, the prayers around a chapel, the blessings of ground, sun and rain...such memories lead me to add flowers, leaves, logs, butterflies and other organic matter to my material natural works”.
The glittering surface of the organ pipes with its folds and projections mirrors the images of just one day of ordinary hysteria in an Asian megalopolis, crowded with passers-by who wear smog masks while crossing a crammed, noisy city crossroads. The vision of such a daily hell, where nature seems to have lost all of its power, is superimposed by mnestic traces of the good old days not yet spoilt by the spiritual crisis of our contemporary age. In Brigitta Rossetti's work both realities are fused and become a single entity where present and past coexist at the same time. Crossing is a contradictory work, a sort of Taoist oxymoron which points at the intrinsic mingling of constructive and destructive forces that liven up an anthropic conception of the universe. This is right the opposite principle inpired by the work entitled Sempre dritto, avanti, gira a destra (Go ahead, straight on, turn right) which is a reference to man's creative potential and power of modifying reality through our thoughts. For this installation the artist retrieved seven old round sieves and painted each one with a plethora of imaginary planets, such as Planet Raimbow, Planet Lone Tree, or even Planet Hibernation. As in many other works the artist's constructive attitude and capacity of nourishing feelings of hope and gratitude towards the universe is clearly expressed in this installation. In Seven Days of Thanksgiving the number seven, symbol of human nature perfecting and of the totality of the created universe (3 days for the sky and four days for the earth). The seven peels painted in acrylic and mixed technique and lined up in upward order represent a sort of personal, votive home altar devoted to nature and the animal world, as well as to childhood memories, to music and to the tales and stories that brighten up our existence.
To sum up, Effetti Personali (Personal belongings) seems to epitomise all the different facets of Brigitta Rossetti's artistic research, but it also most probably represents the story of a spiritual and aesthetic training watched over by the everlasting shield of nature. It is a heart-broken, attentive declaration of the present hardship of human nature yet brightened by a glimmer of hope and the omen of a better future. Even in our dark age Lord Byron' immortal verse still sounds like firm warning: “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods / There is a rapture on the lonely shore / There is society where none intrudes / By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:/ I love not Man the less, but Nature more”
George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1818 (Canto IV, stanza CLVIII)
Ivan Quaroni – Art Critic
Effetti Personali (Personal belongings)
They are frail and short-lived, a few will blossom only for one day, yet they are charming, catch the attention and delight the heart. Brigitta Rossetti, a young, cultivated artist with lively creative inagination paints flowers of various shapes and colours. They spring from the earth of a faintly shaped, uneven hill and fill the canvas with their high, thin stems. They are harlequin-patterned, watery, balsam flowers, flowers of conscience that bring about stories and hint at allegorical meanings.
We watch them from below and feel as small and helpless as children, sitting on a chair, sometimes a straw-bottomed one, or maybe a wooden or metal chair, however an integral part of the installation, of the Children's Garden.
Brigitta Rossetti was born in Piacenza, where she lives and works, in 1974 and she devotes herself to express her own thoughts and reflections within the walls of an old barn. The artist draws inspiration from the place where she lives: the countryside, be it wild or cultivated, everlasting although constantly changing.
The frailty of beauty, the instability of life, the unavoidable change leading towards oblivion, consideration for whatever is pure and innocent: these are the values that the artist has learnt from nature and which she never strays from. Since she has a solid academic education, Rossetti is a poet before being a painter. Her verse, praised by the critics, and even more frequently the verse of such great poets as Lucretius, Horace and Catullus, but also of Pascoli, Parini, Quasimodo and many others, often inspire, influence and accompany the analysis and comprehension of her artistic output.
Rossetti's artistic career has developed following and joining the post avant-garde currents of the world's artistic scene. Along the lines of such currents, but without the fear of going beyond their boundaries, we can realise how Brigitta Rossetti can easily tackle painting, collage and sculpture, as well as videos and installations; she sometimes likes to mix various techniques and different artistic languages.
Her visionary compositions, as delicate and flowing as harmonious melodies, are the result of the strong fascination and attraction that the eastern culture has over the artist, "from both the shady and the sunny side of the wood" as Brigitta herself explains.
Thus, in dream-like atmospheres, with delicate, apparently swift and inaccurate strokes, with soft hazy hues, Rossetti outlines the shapes of ethereal figures. With all her works the artist aims at getting the viewers involved and leading them towards the depth of her reflection. That she achieves by means of a sublime presence-absence play: in front of the work she puts a chair or a bookstand with a book of poems (as is the case of Fiori Sonori), or she sets torn pages of old books on the canvas background (see Hortus Conclusus).
The effect is extremely impressive; the works are crammed with messages and invitations for anyone ready to gather them without feeling powerless against the flowing of life or the faults of a superficial, violent and abusive world, but willing to overcome troubles relying the power of one's own inner strength and of poetry.
Vittorio Sgarbi – Art Critic
Gli Artisti di Portofranco Project
Brigitta Rossetti
Talking about the Japanese, Vincent Van Gogh used to say, "they live in nature as though they were flowers themselves". If he had used the same words for her, Brigitta Rossetti would not have agreed, because she knows that a human being is not a blade of grass, nor an anemone, nor even a rose. On the earth each human being is like a wayfarer (Caspar David Friedrich's romantic Wanderer) who is not trying to find himself/herself in a blade of grass, an anemone or a rose, but for a trace of God, for the absolute experience of ecstasy. With a sort of child-like grace Brigitta offers such experience. Not carried on a silver tray, but on a straw-bottomed small chair. Her Children's Gardens are a perfect, happy painting collection of huge eye-level flowers and a small chair in front of the painting as an integral part of the installation; it is an invitation to contemplate nature not in its grandiose views, but in its mysterious, disarming simplicity. Only in this way – with a restful breakaway from the world, and a spiritual attitude of concentration and meditation – can a long-awaited miracle occur, the miracle that also the great poet Giovanni Pascoli was looking forward to: being amazed, easily moved and delighted by very simple things, so as to "being able to see what we used to see as children, with childish eyes and hearts".
That straw-bottomed chair is for Brigitta what Gauguin's chair was for Van Gogh: the emblem of a simple, domestic way of considering art. From the dark core of his disenchantment, Emil Cioran once wrote that "almost all works are made with strokes of imitation, learnt thrills and plagiarized ecstasies". Not in our case, at least, where art is vow of truth, declaration of necessity, healing balm; where art is air, food and daily bread, not the Sunday's tray of tea cakes.
The often monumental-sized splinters of nature simply signed by Brigitta with her surname Rossetti, keep their poignant fragility intact: it is an unintentional, almost unaware analogy with Ukiyo-e, "pictures of the floating world". That ahead-of-its-time impressionist technique, the greatest expression of Japanese art between the 18th and 19th centuries, stemmed from the principle, as stated by Hokusai, that "the creation is master".
This is what also Brigitta knows, even though she hesitates to acknowledge and admit it aloud, even to herself. The reason? The snare of cliché. Brigitta Rossetti is afraid of the conventionality of mind and heart, the truism of things said and heard. She is afraid of the automatic reaction of thought without the adjustments of feeling, afraid of the idleness of the eye hostage to categories, of dogmatic judgement lacking the real courage of reflection. Brigitta is afraid of the divine simplicity of the blade of grass and field flowers, as she knows that for most people that simplicity is on the verge of triviality. She is afraid of being misunderstood, of being mixed up with whoever has interpreted and portrayed nature as decoration, picture postcard and mere stylistic practice. Not out of arrogance, mind you, but because she does not want to trivialize the suffering and search that have accompanied and still accompany her journey as a pilgrim, a Wanderer who is looking for coded messages and hidden meanings in the beauty of nature.
With the same sort of Chatwin-like restlessness, which actually is urgent need of knowledge. Brigitta would like to grasp the elusive mystery of living; like Eugenio Montale she would like to discover "the weak link" and explore that dark, secret territory that, according to Pablo Neruda, lies "between the shadow and the soul". Although such an achievement seems impossible, Brigitta has not made a fuss, as many others have done, but she has turned it into poetry, into low, enchanted prayer.
Beba Marsano - Art Critic
Brigitta Rossetti
I am the lamp that burns
gently
(Giovanni Pascoli)
Brigitta Rossetti is a sweltering hothouse of ideas which leads her to pit her skills against a host of artistic languages by freely associating insights and drives to matter, pigments and volumes.
The outcomes of her research are varied, yet always imbued with a deep sense of transcendence and of the sacred that Ms Rossetti looks for and strives to find in nature, intended as a wide space open to relations. It is nature that the artist aims at, to help her keep the magic of inspiration always alive and working. Inspiration is the most proper expression for Rossetti as an artist, since she is actually “inspired”, you would say “burnt” by her own inspiration. That is what we become full aware of when we think of the absorbed way in which she describes her works and moves amidst them in her home studio, how carefully she shifts and looks at them, as though she was observing her artistic outcome for the first time and was ready to be excited by any inner hint.
Brigitta Rossetti is endowed with a complex creative imagination where art, philosophy and poetry are in close communication with psychological analysis. These are the tools she masterly handles to draw her “landscapes” which are above all portraits of inner life. Her works often evoke silent worlds and broadened spaces; maybe inspired by the wide spaces of the countryside where Brigitta Rossetti was born, grew up and learnt to become aware of the surrounding reality and where, from time to time, after urban breaks, she still toughens and refines her own anxieties,
Aquae aureae (2010) was for the artist an experience of intense acceleration during a period of solitude and expectation spent in Chicago, which led to the unfolding of a volcanic, supernatural portrait of nature. Here Brigitta is just like a novel Persephone, queen of the underworld, the daughter of light and darkness, at the very time of her meeting with the cycle of vegetation and generative nature. She is pregnant, yet still ignores it; this “bright expectation” finds in water, namely holy water, the path towards new destinations. This work has a rare quality, that is the carrying out of an enchantment that can only be aroused by “inspired” art : shaping what is still shapeless, but urgently throbs on the threshold of shadow. In this work one of the most relevant features of Brigitta Rossetti’s artistic language is at its best, namely the ability to describe a vision without being bewildered, to cherish a state of grace under close control. Through delightful layings of colours the breath of a complex inner life governed by alert spontaneity is effectively conveyed. Just as Paolo Levi has written, “Here Brigitta Rossetti rekindles confidence in figurative painting and indirectly answers the uncertain query – which has been under debate since the early years of informal art – of whether every path has already been covered in the field of representational painting. Maybe”.
Also inspiration for her Children’s Garden (2013) installations originated in 2010, when the artist was staying in Chicago and felt the pangs of nostalgia and homesickness: “It is out of place that I have been striving after the necessity of breathing nature which, in large cities, is confined to a park or just a bush, maybe blackened by traffic smog. It was in one go that I looked for large flowers on the canvas, flowers that are bigger than people, flowers that are reminiscent of life, of sacrifice and hope, flowers that can even grow in the desert”. That was it. The exhibition effectively displays such installations that urge reflection on the relationship between what is immeasurably large (the exaggerated size of flowers) and what is extremely little (the tiny chair), even though the aspect of what is “little” as seen from the eyes of a child is a possible choice, not a final one. Perhaps even that “scale jump” cherished by children, their special way of capturing in any daily experience those juicy bits of a wonderful horror which can be scary and extremely entertaining at the same time. Some of these huge flowers convey the impression of something “dreadful”, yet such dread is irresistibly and gracefully appealing, as the tiny chair seems to be suggestive of. We are therefore led to look “above” in a more dense and terrifying way than would be implied by looking “down”, as it means, first of all, inward look. Also the evocative power of Giovanni Pascoli’s poetics (which will be clearly manifest in the Passi Verdi (Green Steps) series, is hinted at in the celebration of the capacity of being filled by wonder that distinguishes the world of childhood. And also the capacity of facing the hypertrophy of a nature that can host such strange creatures and mysterious voices with the innocent, fragile attitude of a child.
In Fiori della coscienza,(Flowers of consciousness) more than in other works, the sound of these voices is particularly revealing. Bright, light colour strainings upon a black background make these flowers a perfect negative, they are mysterious images that show off and disappear, emerging from and submerged in a sort of fluid suspension, a stream of consciousness of dense pigments. Together with the Fiori della bestia (Flowers of the beast) they are probably the most “psychic” flowers, compared to which the tiny rocking chair expresses the irrevocable summon to an apparently soothing experience of contemplation.
Fiori del Signore (The Lord’s flowers) are “humble” flowers unharmed by the wind; they are gentle yet strong, dignified by a sandy pigment which keeps them closely linked at the ground base, looking like a smile. They are simple flowers, actually the ones more similar to recognizable flower shapes, which evoke the strength of a terse prayer that reaches its receiver straight away.
Fiori dell’oasi (Flowers from the oasis) are visionary, haunted compositions, pure light flashes as though coming from the outer space, floral comets facing a mirage, a restorative break evoked by the aqueous background; They are dazzling tracks of a spirit that masters things and probably represent the most impressive outcome of the whole series: the evocation of a mystic land whose mysterious significance is embodied by the huge flowers. They are flowers that “urge an inner emotional response” and lead the matter concerned towards an evasive, yet extremely powerful elsewhere.
Sopra quel nero vidi, roseo, (Upon that black I saw, rosy ) conceals a kneeling stool, the evocative image of those small altars, simple meeting corners with the divine we occasionally and suddenly come across along country roadsides. Kneeling down towards nature is not enough; we need a key, which the artist evokes trough a tiny old lock nailed to the low side of the table and again at the very heart of the work. The installation belongs to the Passi Verdi (Green Steps) series (2012) in which the concern for the safeguard of nature (so deeply felt by the artist and a long-lasting issue) is complemented by the power of poetry and Pascoli (with his Primi Poemetti, Canti di Castelvecchio and Myricae) is not a chance encounter. Pascoli’s poetry is somehow analogic and rests on starts and revelations, short, delicately musical sentences. Silence surrounding the words in Pascoli’s poetry, is reminiscent of the wide white space overhanging the green, plexiglas kneeling-stool, a hue that summons, heals and regenerates. Therefore Pascoli’s grammar of “humble things” from daily life, be they unassuming or familiar, is met by a cosmic vision that dissolves the boundaries between earth and sky and is open upon a peaceful space where pure air and water are merged. Such space is only inhabited by soft pigments, flowers linked with the idea of death and peach blossoms, a sort of lay thanksgiving hosanna to heaven.
“I like works that are invisible” Brigitta Rossetti claims; actually her Lost Spring (Lost Spring I e Lost Spring II, 2011) series marks an attempt at portraying invisibility or, better, fading – with the help of blotting paper – where the most cherished shapes of nature seem to pass and fade away leaving their poignant sinopias behind. The indeterminateness of the artist’s creative outcome is paradigmatic here. The acrylic pigment on paper becomes the aggregated matter of an artistic language which, as the artist herself maintains, is not ascribable to any artistic movement ; “I am neither representational nor informal painter: what I am aware of is that I must use colour and then destroy it”. The technique? To undo what is real under the blows of different sintaxes and then revive it as the chromatic agglomerate of a language that is new or simply belongs to a different area of perception.
With her Lost Spring IV (2012) Brigitta Rossetti follows the same trend and accepts new pigments with warmer shades ranging from pink to lilac and lavender; hues that hint at a new poetic horizon. Those flowers drop their petals in much more free shapes. We get the impression that a long-time longed unknown artistic language has now become a new idiom whose syntax has only been learnt by Brigitta, but whose mere significance everybody can easily grasp. Such shades of colour have permeated Brigitta Rossetti’s most recent artistic research: her Fiori immaginari (Imaginary Flowers) series tinged with the suggestions of Latin classics and, above all, the La flor que yo esperaba series, in which the artist, inspired by Pablo Neruda’s verse, is on the path of a new minimalism where freedom of expression is greater than ever. When looking at such works you feel you could, and you actually should, shut your eyes, reach out your arms and rely on your sense of touch; there the artist seems to have reached new, although never final, achievements. She gets there via other senses, with eyes shut, yet cast into the future…
Once I said to you:
do not be angered, love,
if I am a different woman.
Maybe I am just like a column of smoke,
but the firewood burning underneath
is the golden wood from the woodland.
(Alda Merini)
Susanna Gualazzini - Art Critic
Brigitta Rossetti has perfectly understood that art can merely suggest and sometimes develop that which has been expressed already.
There is a parallel world, perfectly interchangeable with ours. And if giving the key to our dreams is impossible, it is possible however, through constant representations, to provide at least a glimpse. We are called to look through this glimpse and we see a rapid sequence of some still photos which, in their various themes, repeat themselves in character, in the style of space, like in a fixed backdrop.
If these constantly keep on escaping, painting constantly keeps on pursuing them, moving on endlessly and, as consequence, shifting the picture.
Her colours and her pictorial gestures, her tender figures and her writings are the pure expression of a world that opens itself towards new visions, new realities, new expressive horizons.
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