With a clear-cut painting, without hyper-realistic structuralism, Barbara Pietrasanta plays out a constant game of displacements, situations and meanings, of exchanges of roles between the Artist who paints and the subject represented, in which only painting is in a position of strength.
Director of Arte magazine
In her pictorial research the artist brings into play all the main themes linked to a profound sense of life, of the relationship between men and women and in particular of the perplexing question of individual identity.
Art critic
I define myself as a communicating artist because I work with art, communication, and visual languages. In my poetics, these aspects are constantly in dialogue with one another, shaping an all-encompassing vision of the contemporary world.
I began working as an Art Director in the 1980s, when the advertising world was rapidly expanding and there was a great sense of excitement—no computers, but plenty of hands-on work with brushes and colors that set ideas in motion. A turning point came when I decided to leave for New York, where I lived for several years, because that was where things were happening—long before they reached us. For me, that was real professional development: not sitting in Master’s programs, but learning “on the road.” To support myself, I did everything from waitressing at Caffè Dante in the Village to working as an illustrator for Uptown agencies, in that city where anything could happen—such as seeing Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat sparring in a boxing ring, or being served at your table by Madonna in an East Side club.
It was there that I defined my artistic path, with subjects charged with ambiguity and contradiction, and it was there that I held my first exhibitions, in the galleries of West Broadway. I also created several frescoes in Connecticut using the original technique I learned from an artist from Molise who had lived with the Oglala Native Americans
