Giuliana
Carbi
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Luciana
Cicogna began painting while still young. Her father enrolled
her at art school wanting her
to continued the family tradizion of restoring antique forniture.
She then continued her studies at the Academy of fine Art
along with Giuseppe Santomaso during the years of the student
revolt. Before the mid - seventies when she began to have
her own personal exibitions,she became acquainted with the
debate regarding painting thanks above all to Mario De Luigi,
who she had the opportunity to meet during a summer course
in Salisburg. She has always liked the works of Melotti,
Fontana, Novelli, or “pittura-pittura”,also
Verna and colleagues:from the beginning has tended towards
the abstract through her own interior vocation. Perhaps
in contrast with a world full of artistic decoration she
insists on a total elimination or even any illusion of anything
3-dimensional. In fact her dominant characteristic has always
been the composition of areas of colour cut out as signals
in the pictorial field. Lirical characters or scenes from
an imaginary theatre;hypothetical views of Flatland; skies,
many skies in the background: Luciana Cicogna leads us to
interprete these geometric shapes as figures,almost as if
armed against substance and weight.
Not by chance does she prefer watercolours. She requires
transparency and soft colours; she wants to translate in
suspended form, the sensation of a moment lived more magically.
Shiny polygons are fitted into denser ones,casually placed
on a background where water dominates the paper or colour
is thin on the canvas. They are virtual collages. They are
born trough trial and retrial of colours and shapes. In
fact Luciana Cicogna does not use preparatory drawings:
she discovers chromatic and compositive equilibrium by using
a series of materials and paper which she prepares herself
and which are cut irregularly. They are prevently square
or rectangular,the internal soul of which, coloured whith
special watery textures, has “consumed” the
straight lines of the sides. She then positions and repositions
them.
It is only when an intense series of reciprocal relationships
between these fragments, at first autonomous, has seemed
to be fixed can she transfer
to the opera the fragile equilibrium between form and colour
established as a firm certainty. It is here within the marked
borders of these apparent collages that the intensity of
the moment reveals itself. Life is animated and is enclosed
there, it remains protected and suspended: symmetry is proposed
and contradicted, transparent colour confronts the opaque,
the regular form includes elements which are higly irregular.
But can we call these shapes “protagonists”
which are at times linked together,thanks to elements which
look like strings or which prop up one another or which
are even “nailed” to parts which give one the
impression of land at the horizon? Why are these flat, square,
improbable islands with their strongly outlined impassable
borders floating suspended, without any way of anchoring
themselves definitively?
They seem consistent, of this world,composed in this and
no other way, while any slight movement could render the
internal order critical, mix them or drop them - just like
a castle made of cards: they seem to have foundation because
the element-collage, however virtual, is the result of a
radical statement of position.
How therefore - the works of Luciana Cicogna seem to ask
us - is it possible to preserve spontaneity in a confusedly
hostile world whose irremediable contradiction is to ask
for the vital certainty of a relative recognizanze, while
at the same time negate a stability of position within the
continual variation of life?
They ask a complex existential question whith the usual
levity, typical of the world of fantasy.
february
1997
translated
by Patrick Knipe
