Toni Toniato
The silence
of abstraction
Luciana
Cicogna’s recent works unmistakably demonstrate, not
only the artist’s ample expressive maturity but, at
the same time, a line of linguistic research of exemplary
coherence, capable of evolving in the direction of propositions
that conjugate the specificness of the language of the great
Veneta pictorial tradition and totally modern sensibility
for a notion of abstraction - interpreted by her, however,
as a deep-felt reflection on the natural world and her own
inner life.
It is precisely
this need that leads the artist to formulate a relatively
lyric investigation which is in its own way quite singular,
because freed of any geometric assumptions as well as any
merely formalistic considerations. In other words, Luciana
Cicogna’s is a declension of her own concept of abstraction
which she identifies with the material itself of the pictorial
process, founded essentially on chromatic etymons of resolutive
visual significance.
A state of stupefaction cloaks the metaphoric development
of the images, the figures of the mind and of perception,
cadenced within sequential prospects following a spatial
progression of imminence as well as temporal intensity.
Emerging from the various chromatic panels - tuned in perfect
tonal registers -are signal tangles, sinuous forms that
evoke a world of precious analogies through magnetic delicacy
and subtle inventiveness, and structural correspondences
between elements drawn from phenomenal and spiritual reality.In
substance, Luciana Cicogna’s painting tends to depict
the silence of abstraction on those luminous, rigorously
separated surfaces, saving it from the immobility of the
various syntaxes of constructive and rationalistic authority,
opening it to the dynamism of a contemplation turned to
multi-universes of the cosmologic imagination.
Her “microcosms”
in point of fact – the parallel is a painting on the
motif of the Milky Way - are the writing of the topologies
of silence, places of a meditative action on the essence
of perceiving, of listening to the recondite profoundness
of living things, of nature, and the world. The enucleation
of these not always immediately decipherable visual notions
accompanies us, moreover, to a morphology of their reception
in the most pregnant significance of the interior senses,
where they arrive – by alchemies, fortunately, in
her, unforgotten – as senses and emotions perhaps
not otherwise perceptible. What grace is at work in that
lyric sorcery! It is fruit of acute sensibility, of unifying
interpenetration of the imagination with fractal movements
that catalyse the transformative flow of the living material
in relative evolutions and declining phases. Nevertheless,
the artist does not aim to deconstruct or fragment the forms,
but uses them as pretexts, as urgings deriving from lucidly
listening - translating them into a different existence,
in the incommensurable dimensions of pictorial charm, in
ideational consonance with the same spiritual temperatures
as Klee and those phantasmagoric ones of Mirò.
Luciana
Cicogna has oriented herself in this direction right from
her academic studies with Santomaso, from whom she has inherited
a special notion of the spatiality of the image, resolved
by her, though, with greater vividness, also in the evocative
designs of a more implicitly natural and environmental origin.
The things, the hours, the seasons pass by in the iridescent
climates of her colouristic transparencies, in the intensely
suggestive tracings and streaks, in the skilful efflorescence
of formal germinative nucleuses that unravel in light wefts
of musical flowering.
Also the
dimensionlessness of the painted or divided up spaces help
to dematerialize the rhythms of those harmonious textures,
accentuating the state of suspension that characterizes
the indefiniteness of the “visions”, the moment
they are transcribed on the way to their appearing first
to the unitary gaze of the conscience, as well as to that
discontinuous of the perception, in this way linking together
the visible order and the invisible, reconnecting it to
the sphere of a mirroring inner life. Her works therefore
give shape to time spaces that belong to the meditative
silence of abstraction, to movement of an imaginal notion
that is reflected with acute intensity through inflexible
exactitude and inexhaustible enthusiasm. A similar state
of listening requires, in fact, the measure of that “drawn
out patience” that Goethe attributes to every true
artistic experience and that Luciana Cicogna, in her present
pictorial recognition, shows she can transmit with a force
and tension that is as expressive as it is mysterious and
persuasive. Pervaded with magic atmosphere is the poetic
sentiment that guides the artist to decant, square after
square, the presence - never completely revealed but simply
called to mind - of an epiphany of light on the horizon
of a vision that transcends physical appearances, the limits
of perception itself.
So those
squares, those windows on the world and on nature express
something that goes beyond the thresholds of seeing and
feeling, becoming part of the tension between the conceivable
and the inconceivable, essence of a place of interior meditation,
to be placed in the work as the pressing need of an interminable
research, at the end of which the appearance - in the form
of these visual metaphors - identifies itself, to paraphrase
Heidegger, with the original language of its truth –
that is, poetically.
January
2005
translated
by Patrick Knipe
trnslated by Patrick
Knipe Trsnslated by Patrick Knipe
