‘Enchantment and enigmas’, Torino, 2 Dicembre 2022
Turin, fantastic and magical city, capable of arousing evocative and mysterious suggestion. In the dark of the evening, when the frenzy subsides, it shows its most intriguing face, capable of immersing you in suspended and elusive atmospheres.
The dark unknown, the enigmatic sense of life, is felt in the historic squares when the sunlight sets in the darkness and everything lights up magically, it almost seems that the icy walls of ancient palaces and immobile celebratory statues come to life between plays of light and shadow, immersed in the deep blue of a foggy night.
But if the darkness is profound, the lights of Spazio Musa, a suggestive place located in an 18th century noble palace full of history and charm, will be able to give a splendid exhibition opportunity to the works of the artist Vittoria Rutigliano, today among the greatest representatives of the new symbolism contemporary.
In front of Vì’s works, the spectator has a visual theatrical experience, which takes place in an expressive, free and creative relational exchange, where the need to go beyond the boundaries of the scenic frame is strongly felt to enter a shared and internal narrative space to communication. Here, as a spectator he becomes a user of a magical figuration, where a multitude of multiple images follow one another in an incessant enchantment.
By presenting her works, we want to take you to explore the world of contemporary collage, in a dreamlike and fantastic crescendo where she is its maximum expression. Great technical ability, that of Vittoria, who with her inquisitive scalpel engraves and removes shreds of everyday reality to reconstruct new feelings, ideas and stories, arbitrarily recounting the past, in a rigorous elaboration of the present, capable of creating futuristic worlds.
Abstraction or figuration? Whichever path the artist chooses, he cannot disregard that flavor of experience that remains entangled in the cut papers and cardboards: being images taken from paper and digital media, many of these pertain to newspaper and magazine advertising, and it is almost inevitable that they take on the appearance of déjà-vu, an alteration of memories in which one experiences a sense of mysterious supernaturality, something which, like the same technique that gives it substance, also has to do with our time or at least belongs to a dream. It inevitably expands in the realization of the works made by the application and superimposition of the fragments arranged as small inlays, or mosaics, which will gradually be codified in a defined way as an authentic and pure image.
Vittoria is an artist who does research. His collages synthesize different traditions of geometric abstraction, concentrating intuition and the creative process in an experimental approach: the decisions that the artist takes before starting a new work set up an algorithm that will regulate the execution procedure from start to finish . An exhibition of dynamic modifications dictated by a mind modulated by sweetness and sonority, the driving force of a compulsive obsession that knows how to discern segments of lifestyles and social behaviors in decontextualized clippings and, subsequently, recontextualized with links to the unconscious, to dreams and to the sur-reality.
“Whatever the human mind has to understand, order is an indispensable condition” (Rudolf Arnheim).
In the “Entropia” series, the artist activates a configuration composed of various elements, following an independent order of space distribution and the creation of forms. She acts without foreclosures of thought, in a system of global arrangement chosen by her, which allows her to produce continuous permutations in a harmonious chaos of lyrical balance, giving the work the character of a determined and orderable reality. It is possible to understand how the concept of nature is reflected within the artistic sphere and the artist’s creative process, but we cannot think of a harnessed Victory. The collage is a metaphor of her mental construction, she lives in the continuous assemblage of herself with the rest of the world, and the world is a continuous assemblage from which she draws the will to act creatively. In the “Dorata” series, the characters and the swarm of objects that hover in an irrational space need to give an innovative identity to the image that advertising communication distorts and distorts, enhancing qualities not possessed for mass consumption. The excited search for iconographic representations is transformed into scenographic changes populated by sibylline characters, which give rise to an existential comedy in which everyone acts with different masks; an act of saving escape, not from our passions, but from the discomfort of our appearance. In the world of Vì it is possible to experience moments of unexpected wonder in which to grasp the strength of an intense beauty, provided that the spontaneous emotional experience is carried out which induces to generate a sense of reflection on the meaning of one’s existence, in profound harmony with the world .
Another fundamental element in Vì’s artistic journey is the careful research of the frame, which not only has an aesthetic function, but here plays a functional role in the work, as it belongs to the material substrate of the image, but without determining or altering the figurative dimension. Even if it is part of the painting, the frame is a real object, the external limit of the image, it is a shared element that gives life to an enclosed, circumscribed place that is staged. The frame anticipates something that is before the internal representation: it marks and makes visible the place of accessibility of the image, a diaphragm simultaneously open to the space in which the spectator can live, on imaginary stages without ever closing the curtain. The frame has for Vì the function of the choir in the Greek theater: a continuous dialogue with the work and at the same time with the spectator. A guide that leads you to enchantment and that could, perhaps, help solve puzzles.
Maria Libera Amato