Michele Bonuomo

09/01/2019

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”