ri’fuʤo
a cura di Emmanuel Lambion
Centrul des Interes
Cluj - Napoca RO
Linda Carrara is an Italian painter (b.1984), based in Milano.
Her body of work is strongly articulated on the dialectical multifold relationships between mankind and its natural and man-made environments.
Deeply tinged with an immersive and pervasive feeling of contemplation and mimesis, it plays with subtle to-and-fros between natural elements and their trompe-l’œil pictorial sublimations, whilst sometimes also activating and integrating them at the chore of her creative process.
It is a work of silent and resilient poetry, enhancing the eloquence of each singular element of the inner landscapes or compositions she re/creates.
The present show originates in the aesthetic shock the artist experienced upon discovering and visiting the Grotta del Genovese in Levanzo in the Aegadian islands, off Sicily. This Paleolithic cave, discovered in 1949, was inhabited by humans probably between 10 000 and 6 000 bc, and still preserves precious testimonies of Paleolithic civilizations, mostly animal and human portraits alongside more abstract forms.
Impressed by the feeling of liminality that pervaded her upon visiting the cave, oscillating between obscurity and light, the intimate discovery of a remote ancestral past of humanity and the external pregnancy of contemporary times, Linda Carrara has endeavored to recreate this experience in the present show whose very title, ri’fuʤo, the phonetic transcription for the Italian for shelter, seems to advocate a retreat to pre-or proto-historical times.
of In fondo al pozzo & La luce tra le foglie, whilst completing the series of cosmic natural elements directly or indirectly evoked in the show.
Carrara uses the separation wall as a sort of trompe-l’œil stone time slab, metaphorizing the transitional feeling she felt upon entering the cave.
On the floor a labyrinthic abstract sign, inspired by old Camunian symbols and made of fudge gathered on a beach closeby, directly evokes crytpic initiatic engravings. Some drawings, similarly suggesting an attempt at tracing primordial alternative labyrinthic signs or paths, are hung in its vicinity.
The main back wall of the space presents a series of six pictorial frottage canvases entitled La Prima passeggiata (i.e. The First Wandering) envelops the viewer with its deep green vibrant shades. The technique of pictorial frottage, often used by Carrara as a sort of way to convey and transmutate the inner expressivity of architectures and textures, evokes in this context the primordial forces implicitly contained by the tactile reliefs of the cave’s walls.
The very gesture of frottage, activating natural silent forces at the chore of Carrara’s creative process, stands in a delicate counterpoint to the signs that were painted or engraved by our ancestors in their first natural shelters.
The title of the works acts at a double level, as if it were inviting to an inner voyage that would be as much diachronic as spatial, through time and space, triggering, to quote Pessoa (it is in us that landscapes find a landscape), a mental landscape that can only exist in the beholder’s mind.
Primordial natural light and forces emanating from the animal or vegetal worlds absorb us in the depth.