Reviews
CRITICAL NOTES ABOUT THE ARTISTIC WORK OF ELISABETTA FONTANA
The artist Elisabetta Fontana is homonymous, or perhaps relative, I do not know, of the great Lucio Fontana, the Italo-Argentinian painter who helped so much in the development of the informal art, father of the " Spatialist art", but Elisabetta Fontana is, in any case, very close to his artistic conceiving.
She has too in her art the seeds of a new view of painting-sculpture, and a way to use matter and colour to represent the unconsciousness as well as an observation and a research for structural pshycophysical spatiality.
The mixed technique used in the works of Elisabetta Fontana belongs to this materiality of the image which covers or reveals, depending on points of view, her natural gift for the representativeness.
Like Lucio Fontana, Elisabetta Fontana sees the image outside the conventional visual field and her research for the immaterial, for the metaphysical is successful thanks to unconventional pictorial means, such as earths, colour mixtures heavy and often gloomy ..
The well known Maurizio Bonicatti, in his "Notes on Modern Art," about reading the Art of Van Gogh, says "... the symbols of the imaginative language hide their semantic identity inside remote implications lying in the depth; whose finding necessarily requires a different method from the one that cancelled the psychological investigation of art criticism, as unrelated to determine an aesthetic content "
And I would also say "ethical" and metaphysical.
The art of Elisabetta Fontana is full of such elements and their literary and pictorial effect is worthy of a great figure of the Contemporary Art as she is.
In her works the beauty, ethical and psychological element, is clear in some works not by chance with double metaphor: "Meeting of souls," "Attraction of opposites in black", "Attraction of opposites in red", "Fragments of life "," Fragments of eternity. "
In 'Meeting of souls", the artist Elisabetta Fontana divides or better combines two or more similar and mirror contexts: two divergent bridges of burnt and cracked brown, plunged in a blood red field sloping upward to brighter shades.
In the middle two elements of cracked earth draw near, looking for each other.
Great is the strain, strong the message.
Other masterpieces of formal research in a very abstract context but metaphysically pregnant and vibrant are the two "Attractions of the opposite black and red".
Here too the formal disposition, with mixed technique, is in perfect syncrony with the causal meaning of the title: two images, one in the dark red almost brown background, the other absolutely black, both are vertically cut by two laminated silver strips, which are in their turn crossed, in a corrugated serpentine pattern, probably by a black iron wire, resulting in a sort of medallion at the top of the painting.
The final effect is dramatic indeed, in the obsession either of repetition of the spiral
movement and of the double meaning of the two compositions: similar but not identical, respectful of inner diversity of each element that falls under our senses.
Another masterpiece that seals the talent and the deep cultural and intellectual preparation of Elisabetta Fontana, is also composed of two horizontal and vertical graphic patterns.
I am referring to the work "Passion."
It 's a work with spectacular, almost three-dimensional kinetics: in perfect correspondence with the title, passion is identified as a scene of fiery volcanic eruption of magma, which boils, becomes red hot, it explodes and then it re-ascends with a impressive conflagration out of control as an irresistible force of nature.
There are all shades of red, raised outside with material that more stresses the play of colours, from glowing white to deep red that degrades to a fading light.
As background, an anxious waiting space appears on one side which deeply and desperately black assists motionless and silent to this huge explosion of our passion, as a volcano.
Pure metaphysics, pure abstraction, pure emotional expressiveness.
Here we are in front of a "lofty, intellectual, cultured, refined Artist, tortured in her interior by this need of screening, by this endless pursuit of ethical perfection of Art, with all the philosophical implications that Elisabetta Fontana, sure one the most important figures in the Contemporary Art worldwide , wants to share with herself and with her many appraisers.
Giancarlo Alù
(President of the European Union of Art Experts)