Francesca Pensa

FiguFigures and Destinies: the Painting of Barbara Pietrasantare e destini: la pittura di Barbara Pietrasanta

From the 1990s onward, Barbara Pietrasanta’s expressive output began to appear in exhibitions — the first significant ones in her career — in which the creative form of her work, already decidedly mature, revealed its originality. The painting of that period, which embraced without hesitation a current and contemporary figuration, unfolds in images where compositional elements develop into a narrative whose interpretation remains open, while nonetheless guiding the viewer toward preferred — and in some cases recurring — themes.

Almost programmatic is the oil Strade, bivi e deviazioni (Roads, Crossroads and Detours), dated 1992, populated by figures of ambiguous gender identity; it finds an echo in Leslie and Gestazione, where the protagonists are men poised between the feminine and the masculine. In this phase of her poetics, reflection on questions of gender identity comes clearly to the fore — themes the artist had been able to explore during her stay in the United States, specifically in New York in the 1980s, when these subjects were actively debated in American culture but still rarely addressed in Italy. The dangers threatening our natural world disturb the transparent water of Petrolio, while the unstoppable flow of migration gives substance to Confini; allusions to defining historical events of our time run through paintings such as Oltre il muro — significantly dated 1990, immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall — and Le gemelle, a work of 2001, the year of the attack on the Twin Towers.

The theme of the figure takes shape in the creation of bodies whose anatomical precision reveals carefully studied chiaroscuro — deployed not so much for realistic effect as for a poetic one. The faces, save in rare cases, are devoid of emotion or feeling, closed in tight mouths and open eyes that can meet the viewer’s gaze with an almost provocative directness. The settings, often suggested by the artist’s memory of her time in America, vary widely and tend toward perspectives inspired by urban spaces or anonymous corners of great metropolises, while the palette is broad, with colours that remain — especially in the monochrome passages that may punctuate the composition — in tonalities that heighten the mental and introspective character of the narrative.

In some of these works the narrative may fracture into different fragments, as in Riscatto, or unfold in separate sections, as in Rivelazioni; but in general the scene is singular, concentrated on a single visual episode that nonetheless presents many facets. This is the case in the significant Il gioco della vita of 1992: on the green baize of a billiard table, the hands of invisible figures take aim at a ball with a cue and hold the pieces of a domino game, while a woman rests her head on her folded arms in the lower part of the scene, confined there by two dark, looming feet. What is the story? Impossible and pointless to establish with precision — other than by evoking the sometimes mysterious role that destiny plays in our lives, exposed, as in a game, to the chance of unforeseeable events.

With the new millennium, Pietrasanta’s art turns toward a painting that, while building on earlier experience, takes on new themes in a coherent development of her expressive means. From the second decade of the 2000s to the present, the poetic discourse shifts to a specific subject: water — a theme that has always been treated consistently throughout the history of art, as one might easily imagine for the element upon which all life depends. Barbara’s painting thus takes its place in a long red thread running through centuries of artistic history, in which water has assumed both positive and negative values, exemplified most clearly in the age-old iconographies of Christian baptism and the universal flood.

In the water stands the woman of Blu profondo and the modern Aphrodite of Anadiomede, in a liquid embrace that endows the setting with a vital and almost cathartic evocative power. But very different is the story of the figures in other works, in which water seems to assume a negative and perilous valence — the cause of destructive and terrifying shipwrecks. As Pietrasanta herself has noted, programmatically central to this cycle is a 2014 oil entitled Deposizione, in which water is only evoked — as an agent of death for the prone body, half-visible beneath a sheet. A tag, like those attached to bodies in a morgue, identifies the figure as one of the victims drowned in the Lampedusa tragedy. If the image thus reflects the memory of the age-old iconography of the Deposition of Christ, that single detail renders it absolutely contemporary, adding to the shipwrecks of these works a precise historical reference.

The figures depicted may appear alone, but of particular interest is the dual presence of female figures that characterises other works in this cycle. Observed carefully, one notices that the two women represented are always the same: one with short fair hair, the other, younger, with long dark hair. They wear similar garments — white, light, and translucent dresses that allow glimpses of black undergarments — and seem to have been caught by something inescapable, like a shipwreck, at a personal and intimate moment. They stand side by side — one seated, one standing — in Come dopo il naufragio (As After the Shipwreck), a canvas of 2019, each holding the loops of a rope that binds them in a bond that may have been the means of their survival at sea and that endures visibly even afterward. Each viewer may imagine the nature of the relationship between the two women — perhaps friendship, perhaps kinship, as between sisters or even mother and daughter — but this is not what matters: what united them was the water, and the upheaval it unleashed.

In the poetic dimension, the shipwreck evoked in these paintings ultimately loses its specific, literal quality, becoming a metaphor for more general situations that we too may have lived through in our own lives, in the face of unexpected events. And singular, in this sense, is the exhibiting history of this cycle of works — a history that enriches them with further meaning, perhaps even beyond Pietrasanta’s own original intentions. In 2021, everything was ready for a planned exhibition of these works at the Acquario Civico di Milano; but Covid prevented this from happening, except in a reduced form and later than originally scheduled. And what, if not Covid, more closely resembles a modern, collective shipwreck? Then, all of us — like the figures in these paintings — experienced the disorientation that follows an unthinkable event. All of us were left powerless and frightened before the collapse of many of our certainties, brought about by a global pandemic that had until then been unimaginable. And yet the two survivors — the fair-haired and the dark-haired — survived, as we did after the Covid years: there is hope, after the fear.

Also from the 2010s, Pietrasanta initiated the Risvegli cycle, which continues to the present: the canvases — not small in size — present female figures in the act of waking from sleep, wrapped in sheets shadowed by uncertain light, lying on monochrome floors and accompanied by the presence of a small coffee cup with its teaspoon. The works thus describe the instant of the passage from sleep to wakefulness, with all the implications this carries in the transition from the dream world — where the most unspeakable and fantastic desires unfold — to the reality of the world, with all its tangible and demanding situations. Female figures move through this moment and experience it in always different ways: half-asleep, eyes barely open (Svegliati); or awake but caught in the postures of sleep (Ora e non prima, Awakening); or already fully present, seated amid the folds of the sheets (Nel lenzuolo bianco, Turbamento, Domani è un altro giorno, Qualcosa ho dovuto lasciare).

Beside them is always the small coffee cup that wakes us and accompanies us as an indispensable tonic into the reality of the world. But the coffee cup is also the object in which one has often looked for a foretelling of the future: those women seem to be asking themselves what their own destiny will be — in the day just beginning, but also in the future dimension of the existence awaiting them. This is what the awakened figure of Il vuoto è nulla (2019) does with unmistakeable clarity. The coffee cup is thus, in these image-narratives, no secondary detail — as works specifically devoted to it, such as Nell’ombra and Satori, make clear. The theme widens further, no longer confined to the simple observation of a moment of everyday life that we all experience daily, but becoming a narrative of how we face the future with our fears and hopes. The protagonists of this cycle are women and young girls, who add an autobiographical tone to the final result — in the distinctly feminine sensitivity of looking inward — while depicting a situation that manages to become universal.

A significant variation on this theme appears in one of the most recent paintings Pietrasanta produced in 2024, Sogno d’inverno (Winter Dream), in which beside the sleeping figure there lies, across the brightness of the bed, the shadow of a bare tree — a natural element that opens the iconography of these works to a new dimension.

The expressive approach engages, as in the works from the new millennium onward, with visual narrative in a purely pictorial mode — that is, without interruption or fragmentation such as text insertions — and thus in a unified treatment of the theme, which unfolds without the slightest digression in its poetic synthesis. The figures are those typical of all of Pietrasanta’s art, to which is added a carefully studied rendering of the enveloping sheets that allow glimpses of the anatomies of concealed nudes — a modern and original use of the age-old theme of drapery.

The chromatic palette is defined by homogeneous, never vivid colours, arranged in a carefully studied tonality — tilting toward blues, greys, and whites — that create intimate and pervading atmospheres capable of almost entirely submerging the figure, as in the recent oil Perturbamento.

The mark that constructs the composition remains faithful to that already widely practiced by the artist in the building of images whose visual result always shows a personal interpretation of real-world inspiration; but Barbara does not forgo works in which expressive intention reveals a mark generated by a deeper and more urgent inner state. This occurs in the tense, restless figure of Fragments of Awakening and even more so in Trascurabili frammenti (Negligible Fragments), an oil played on the counterpoint of whites and blacks. It seems no coincidence that both titles speak of fragments — as if that broken mark better defines a fragment, brief yet charged with feeling, of existence.

It is interesting, and I would say inevitable, to situate this painting within comparisons that help illuminate its meaning by extending it into a historical perspective. The depiction of the sleeping woman is very ancient and has been explored by artists since the most remote times, when it took the celebrated form of Ariadne sleeping — abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus, who took advantage of her catatonic slumber. A canonical example of this archaic iconography is the celebrated sculpture preserved in the Vatican Museums, in which the semi-recumbent body reveals the complete unconsciousness of the sleeping figure.

But many women also sleep in more recent times, beginning with the Venus in an illustration from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili — a supremely refined text printed in Venice in the fifteenth century — an image that is likely the root of the many female figures immersed in sleep and depicted, from the quattrocento onward, in so many celebrated works: those of Giorgione, Titian, Poussin, Füssli, Courbet, Delvaux, Picasso. In these representations of sleeping women across the history of art, what appears decisive is invariably the sleep itself — deep and paralysing, rendering the depicted women defenceless, as shown by the already cited Venus of the Hypnerotomachia, accompanied by a menacing ithyphallic faun, and as seen in Füssli’s celebrated The Nightmare, where the protagonist is loomed over by frightening, terrifying monsters. In Barbara’s works, the figures enact a significant transformation of this ancient iconography: the women are waking from sleep — and it is not difficult to read a historical meaning into this awakening, as a metaphor for the contemporary condition of women.

The conclusion of this journey seems to me identifiable in the nude of Aftercut — a recent work and something close to a final chapter of this story told in images. In the painting, the young woman appears decisively upright, standing while looking the viewer directly in the eye; she holds a tray with a small coffee cup that has perhaps tipped over in the act of rising — but which, in spilling without the coffee having been drunk, may underline the protagonist’s awareness of waking by herself, without help of any kind. A woman who is autonomous, as may also be read in two other paintings by the artist in which the female figure is accompanied by a bird — always felt and understood as a symbol of freedom. This occurs in Visione taumascopica, where a colourful parrot appears, and in the recent Annunciazione, la promessa sospesa (Annunciation, the Suspended Promise), in which a Palestine sunbird alludes to events from our most urgent and dramatic current reality.

The painting of Barbara Pietrasanta thus reveals an indisputable originality that, precisely by virtue of its quality, cannot fail to carry within it connections and references to other expressive situations — past and present. First to be considered is the choice of figuration, evident throughout the artist’s entire output: a choice of field whose defining term is clarified only when pursued to its depths, in its semantic and above all historical meaning. By figuration we mean specifically a mode of art that represents — with variants ranging from photographic reproduction to the barest reminiscence — the reality of people and their world.

Beyond the assessments made in times fortunately now past — which classified this creative orientation and its opposite, abstraction, in positive or negative terms — what appears entirely clear today is the extraordinary vitality of figuration (as an exhibition of some years ago was entitled), which has crossed the century of the avant-gardes undaunted, arriving in full health to the present. Among the periods of the twentieth century that saw the pre-eminence of artistic forms more closely connected to real-world inspiration are the 1980s, when the atmosphere of the Transavanguardia superseded the Neo-avant-gardes of the immediately preceding phase. This is, not by coincidence, the moment at which Barbara makes her appearance on the art scene — arriving there with a canonical formation, acquired at the Liceo Artistico and at the Accademia through the practice of drawing and the search for her own originality within a sensibility cultivated in dialogue with the history of images past and present. It is significant that her teacher at the Liceo di Brera was Mimmo Paladino — a leading protagonist of that expressive season — whose art would nonetheless constitute, as would that of other teachers encountered along the way (Alberto Ghinzani, Maurizio Giannotti, Antonio Miano, Fernando Sambati), a distant background, deeply sedimentated in the painter’s visual memory.

Regarding her American period — lived by Pietrasanta in the 1980s — critics have cited as possible influences artists such as Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein. But beyond that phase of art, which saw, in the complexity of its results, the final season of Warhol and the rise of artists such as Basquiat (who do not appear to have greatly interested our artist), it is the timeless stillness of the images of the father of American painting — Edward Hopper — that seems to have most fascinated her. Yet the stunned melancholy of the American master, constructed within settings of nocturnal diners and desolate rooms inhabited by solitary figures, does not belong to Barbara’s creative vision, which steers her poetic discourse toward more serene and assured horizons. Nonetheless, observed carefully — particularly in Pietrasanta’s early works — faint echoes of Pop Art emerge, both in the general terms of the figurative choice and in the chromatic definition. And certainly, taking into account her parallel career in the field of advertising, the expressive forms of the American movement cannot fail to have interested her — especially in the dissolution of the boundary between the two fields, legible above all in Warhol’s production, resulting in the creation of compositions enriched by the insertion of text and by the fragmentation of the poetic discourse, derived, in an original reworking, from her knowledge of advertising graphics.

Other clearer and more significant connections link Barbara’s art to the Milanese sphere in which she has always worked and of which she may today be considered a significant protagonist. It is almost natural to identify a relationship with the expressive current that characterised the Milanese experience in the second half of the twentieth century — Realismo Esistenziale (Existential Realism) — in whose images, as in those of our painter, there persists an uninterrupted attention to the human condition, seen as an individual participating in a historical situation. Among the protagonists of that artistic season, it is the figures of Ferroni that seem to me closest to those created by our artist — sharing with them an immobile and silent stillness.

Turning then to artists fully active in the present, it seems correct to place Pietrasanta’s art alongside that of figures from the Lombard sphere who have made the theme of the figure the substantial element of their poetics — among others Marco Cornini, Gioxe De Micheli, Renato Galbusera, Antonio Miano, Alessandro Papetti — with a particular affinity with the painting of Maria Jannelli, with whom Barbara shares that intimate characterisation of figures that is never an end in itself, but a reflection of more general conditions observed through an unambiguously feminine eye.

Within a narrative that is never explicitly didactic but rather allusive — and not infrequently constructed through metaphor — constant and deepening has always been, as already noted in this essay, our artist’s attention to themes sensitive to the social, and therefore political, questions of contemporary life: issues related to immigration, climate change, the condition of women, and gender identity. This poetic perspective too places Barbara Pietrasanta within a precise Milanese history — past and present — in which significant points of reference for her have been artists such as Galbusera and Miano, with whom she shares the formative experience of the Liceo di Brera. A convergence that has meant — and continues to mean — not only a sympathy of ideas and convictions, but also the sharing of precise choices in the world of art and beyond, in a trajectory that runs from the 1970s to the present day.

Roberto Scarpetti

“Castaways and Shipwrecks”

The Shipwreck can be a strong and dramatic metaphor, applicable to multiple aspects of the life of each of us, both in the intimate, private and public sphere be they personal shipwrecks or collective shipwrecks: the shipwreck of the West that seems to be looking for a new identity for a new soul; the shipwreck of planet earth that we have not been able to safeguard; the shipwreck of our lives suddenly changed by the pandemic; the shipwreck of an increasingly adrift culture; small daily shipwrecks, or large social shipwrecks.

Yet, leaving aside the game of metaphors thrown to the wind which risks trivializing everything, I believe that even more than our amorous, cultural and social destinies, it’s our bodies which pay the price of a shipwreck.

It is no coincidence that the emphasis in the title of Barbara Pietrasanta’s exhibition lies in the first word: Naufraghi (Castaways). And it is this word that remains most impressive, to the point that the event of the shipwreck itself can almost be overlooked. What matters is the afterwards; the bodies that survive the various shipwrecks, metaphorical or real.

And it is upon these bodies, our bodies, that the destinies of the world are drawn, like tattoos that we did not want, like something imprinted on our eyes and in the furrows of wrinkles on our faces. The shipwreck as destiny remains marked on the bodies of the shipwrecked.

This is what the works of Barbara Pietrasanta evoke in me, with her collection of “Castaways and Shipwrecks”; bodies of women emerging from the sea or on the sea abandoned; women without any clothes or with only a petticoat made transparent by the water; women on blinding beaches as blinding as the sea; calm faces of women that appear to me as indecipherable hope. And there is only one man, perhaps, the only one who did not survive the shipwreck.

These images lead me to think that nothing counts beyond bodies, our bodies; those of real castaways, or those painted by Barbara. And so it no longer matters what happened before or no matter how far the sea has pushed us. The reason, the dynamics, or the tragedy of the shipwreck does not matter. What matters is the condition of the person who has been shipwrecked. It’s the afterwards that matters. The afterwards becomes a great opportunity that we cannot let slip through our hands.

 One of the questions Barbara asks me in the video for the exhibition is, ‘what happens the day after the shipwreck?’

I believe that the day after the shipwreck is entirely different because the way we now perceive things around us is different. The shipwreck obliges us to look at the world with a new gaze. And by changing our gaze, our perception of reality that surrounds us changes.

What happened before no longer counts the day after the shipwreck, nor does the shipwreck itself count. The only thing that matters is the condition in which we are, each of us, all shipwrecked,  each individual with our own unique and personal history, each one different but all in the same condition; a condition that makes us, if only for a moment, more similar, and that may perhaps be the only way to understand or to feel each other.

Diego Pasqualin

“Così tra questa
immensità s’annega il pensier mio
e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.”
(Giacomo Leopardi, L’Infinito)

Risacca. Proprio così. Mi lascio trascinare dalla risacca delle onde, da quel tormento che non conosce tregua, in un continuo moto che arretra e avanza, risucchia e mi schianta, infrangendomi, contro a dell’altra acqua. A malapena riesco a prender fiato perché, in quel movimento, non vi è bussola o appiglio, perché al suo interno si cela l’eterno. Così il rumore si fa ovattante silenzio, e viceversa. Ancóra: risacca. Àncora: risacca.
La voce per l’aria s’impreme senza inondazion d’aria, e percote nelli obbietti e ritorna  indirieto alla sua causa.
Le percussione de’ corpi liquidi co’ densi son d’altra natura che le percussion predette. E le percussioni de’ liquidi co’ liquidi ancor si variano dalle percussioni antecedenti. Le percussion de’ densi co’ liquidi se n’è veduta sperienza nelli liti marini, li quali ricevano le acque contro alli lor sassi e li spingano infra le erte spiagge; e spesse volte accade che ‘l corso dell’onda non è ancora ammezzato, che le pietre da quella portate ritornano al mare onde di partirono; la riuna delle quali è aumentata colla potenzia dell’onda che ricade dalle alte spinge. 

Alla deriva. Sulla terra. Sul mio corpo. Sulle tue labbra. Nella cultura. Nei sentimenti. Nel futuro. Sono un naufrago: un sopravvissuto che l’esistenza ha restituito prima che decida di riassorbirmi, per l’ultima volta, in quell’andirivieni dal quale provengo. Tra quelle onde che sono i miei giorni, trovo le immagini create da Barbara Pietrasanta e tra quei colori stesi sapientemente, ritrovo anche qualcosa di me, qualcosa del mare e qualcosa che mi invita a proseguire.

Dove inizia la fine del mare? O addirittura: cosa diciamo quando diciamo: mare? Diciamo l’immenso mostro capace di divorarsi qualsiasi cosa, o quell’onda che ci schiuma intorno ai piedi? L’acqua che puoi tenere nel cavo della mano o l’abisso che nessuno può vedere? 
Diciamo tutto in una parola sola o in una sola parola tutto nascondiamo? Sto qui, a una passo dal mare, e neanche riesco a capire, lui, dov’è. Il mare. Il mare. 

Inizio col raccogliere un frammento di corda, anch’essa restituita dal mare. La salsedine l’ha irrigidita e sfibrata; è ruvida e la lascio scivolare sulla mia pelle perché, nel suo abradere, ho la speranza che porti via anche qualche cosa d’altro, che ho affogato dentro di me, in quegli oscuri fondali che un po’ mi accomunano a quel mare dentro. Come dopo il naufragio ci sono scelte da affrontare, decisioni, nuove ancore da costruire e indipendenze da recuperare. Sono presente e assente nel medesimo tempo, un oceano nel cuore e nei pensieri, ma i piedi sulla dura terra; così come le due ragazze del dipinto, con le quali è impossibile pensare di poter parlare. Quel frammento di gomena che una delle due stringe tra le sue mani, mi pare esattamente quello che sento aggrovigliato nel mio petto mentre, quella in piedi, mi mette di fronte all’indecisione di compiere quel passo in avanti che entrambi vorremo, ma che forse, non compieremo mai. C’è sempre quella corda che mi protegge e mi limita. Perché io non sono una venere Anadiomene e, Se ci fosse il mare non ritroverei la mia verginità, ma il mio silente lato infantile, probabilmente, userebbe quella stessa corda, che ancora tengo tra le mani, per iniziare un tiro alla fune tra Me e Me. Ci sono altri Effetti personali sulla battigia, anche il mare, a volte, sembra indeciso: spinge avanti attraverso l’onda frangente e riporta a sé, recuperando nella risacca, quello che ancora non è pronto a lasciare andare.

Comu mare ca fatica
Cu nu lassa terra soa 

Guardo verso l’orizzonte, se è vero che bisogna tornare per poter ripartire, io mi trovo a dover scegliere se salire su La nave di Delo o su un pattino di Salvataggio. Dopo L’ultimo naufragio che l’intera umanità si è trovata a vivere, ho capito che non vi è terraferma sicura perché “Come sul capo al naufrago, l’onda s’avvolve e pesa”, così mi accorgo che tutto intorno a me è alto mare. Mi perdo nelle onde che creo nella mia tazza di caffè,
la stessa bevanda tanto cara a Pietrasanta che, nei suoi “Risvegli”, aveva anticipato, invertendo l’ordine, di quella che potrebbe essere una risposta ai “Naufragi”, dove gli esasperati panneggi dei lenzuoli, ora appaiono ai miei occhi come il fragoroso incresparsi delle onde che si sarebbero stagliate contro le nuove tele di questa raffinata artista. Con ancora in bocca il sapore dell’espresso cerco di aprire bene gli occhi, come dopo un sonno che, però, non ha ristorato le mie membra, ma le ha atrofizzate nell’attesa di potersi destare e tornare ad essere. 

Guardo verso l’orizzonte; guardo verso la riva e non vi è più solo mare perché Il Mare è solo un pretesto per Pietrasanta. È il Mondo che questa pittrice vuole invitarmi ad osservare. La nave dell’io è adagiata sul fondo delle acque che hanno sommerso o, forse, reso visibili i fondali inquinati della società e, la traversata di questo momento storico, ora è carica di quella stessa speranza che potrei rinominare Lampedusa. 
Forse la risposta è proprio in quel movimento di risacca: non è un semplice guardare indietro, ma ripercorrere una strada a ritroso, per impararne i limiti e gli ostacoli, per offrire una seconda possibilità al frangente e, questa volta, non naufragare, ma approdare su una nuova Terra.

Diego Pasqualin 

Patrizia Raveggi

From Milan through New York, Barbara throws her answers (or flings her question-marks: Why? Where? Who? scattering them through the surface of “15 words and a red dot”, a very recent work) against society’s collapse and gangrene, reverting to her obsessing themes, using her own or somebody else’s body as a filter for chronicle actuality (the twins of “9/11’’; the Renaissance silhouette of “Petrol” threatened by impending pollution; “Leslie’s transvestite, lost in alienation and loneliness; the double-profiles (Benjamin’s Angel of history?) of “Untitled”; the butterfly of “Condominium” stabbed by her neighbours’ cruelty, judgment and condemnation or to portray the blossoming breathing of consumerism (the a’ la Leonardo bust in Icon I,) melting it in nature and history (“Oltre il muro”Beyond the wall). Following the thread of Barbara’s transformations, the ripening and widening of her skills (she does not hesitate to make use of the now-a-days hardly known fresco- technique in an impressive Via Crucis cycle), it is easy to detect a continuity in her feeling for the multiple and the complex, the relative and the multi-faceted determining her attitude of systematic perplexity. Since ever, Barbara’s works can be read in a narrative key, there are always human beings, or parts of them, in centre- stage, or along the borders; Barbara’s vision is not hermetic, the seeming realism of her expression is filtered through memory, nostalgia and a subtle, permeating feeling of precariousness. Her detached approach, cold and yearning at the same time, her disapproving eye, do not favour worldly relationships; the checkmate on the practical side is reversed through lyric transfiguration: Barbara dips in Indian colours the background of a (self ?) portrait conceived when- it was 2002- India was nothing more than a hypothesis of unreality. To India she devotes “Ovulation”, fantastic merge between the mother Goddess Kali (in a mitigated Western avatar) and fertility symbols, thus firmly and ahead of time marching towards the hoped for blend.If one was obliged to put a label on contemporary art, this might be defined as a progressive process of dis-identification and uprooting from one’s own traditions, a continuous eradication and tearing of one’s own roots, in the awareness that those roots ARE paradoxically in the eradication itself. The meaning of the journey is therefore towards a civilization made of intertwining, encounters, exchanges between sides, peoples, cultures, individuals, between different colours and sounds. Written stories and paintings cannot be confined inside borders, restricted by one horizon; in a diversified, heterogeneous, open world, where different routes can be mapped out, cultures and traditions are transit stations of an on-going translation and transformation process.

Francesco Poli

Barbara Pietrasanta’s figurative style is clearer and precise, but her paintings suggest a vision of reality that is loaded with fascinatingly complex existential and psychological meaning, seen from a markedly female perspective.

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. Two paintings clearly exemplify the way in which Pietrasanta has dealt with these questions. The first, entitled ‘Il gioco della vita’ (the game of life), looks down on a billiard table, where one hand is seen hitting a ball with a cue, another hand is throwing the dice on the table and at the bottom we see from behind the head and bare shoulders of a woman who is leaning forward and resting her head on the table. The underlying meaning of this work has no need of explanation and yet the symbolic connotations do not detract from the expressive force of the work. The other work is one of the most recent and is a group of sixteen small canvasses making up a polyptych. We see the faces of a man and a woman, with tense and worried expressions. A tin of red paint separates the two faces. Only the words in English: ‘why’, ‘who’, ‘when’, ’they’ appear, sometimes superimposed, on the other panels. Here, too, the question asked is clear, but there are no certain answers. In some other paintings, the female figure is the only protagonist.

In ‘Petrolio’ (Oil), a nude figure (reminiscent of Botticelli’s Venus but with black hair) stands in the clear water that is about to be contaminated with oil. In ‘Ovulation’, in clear homage to Indian mythology, the kneeling female nude has many arms and her many hands hold eggs, symbols of fertility and life.

Michele Bonuomo

What else is there to add to the tragic list of excesses experienced by everyone in the years just gone by? Maybe nothing else.

We have consumed all with an anthropophagous fury: with too much impetuosity and poor planning we have knocked down the “walls”.

With suspicious haste we have dismissed ideologies. With irreducible determination we have torn away every anchorage to history, and painting, having exhausted the brazen optimism of the market, is no longer the great conscience of the world. Only for a few brave people it continues to be an extreme practice. In fact, for those few who no longer want to hide behind make up, false myths, empty provocations, audacities without heroism. The exemplary gestures of those who have put their existence at risk, experiencing passions and tensions without return, have been misunderstood by most or reinterpreted as pieces of an empty and academic representation. Too many tears, blood and sperm have been purchased already freeze-dried and consumed in the fast food of everyday banality. And so the lights went out on a sad vaudeville stage… Even the thousand lights of New York are a dim light that casts sinister shadows on a tragic solitude. Barbara Pietrasanta witnessed all of this, she felt it on her skin, she captured it with her voracious eyes. But without falling into a trap, without becoming a victim. With clear determination, he brought order to his passions, dissecting the corpses of the victims of his time as if on a morgue table, the mysteries of an eros that no longer needs hedonistic disguises to explode contradictions, undermine the rules of the hypocrites and respectable. In his canvases the gestures are calcined like those of a Hellenistic frieze, the bodies are reduced to shreds by the cold light of a flash: they live in the darkness and only for a moment reveal themselves in their visionary dimension. With a clear painting, which does not indulge in hyper-realistic calligraphy, Barbara Pietrasanta implements a constant game of changes, situations and meanings, exchanges of roles between the Artist who paints and the subject represented, in which the strong point remains the painting. Everything else is questioned. Barbara Pietrasanta perhaps chose the most difficult path, perhaps the most vulnerable. But the only one along which it is impossible to cheat.

Michele Bonuomo art critic Director of “Arte”