Patrizia Raveggi

Patrizia Raveggi

20/03/2019
With Patrizia Raveggi at the positioning of the sculpture “Don’t look inside” at the Collezione Farnesina.

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.