Nature And Thought

by Rossana Bossaglia, 2003

For a number of years Marilisa Pizzorno has followed her own ideas about the meaning and significance of art, using a series of specific iconographies: she manages in an extraordinary way to offer us different nuances and to fill her images with different expressive capacities, whilst still remaining absolutely faithful to her own style. Firstly the theme of the nude: light and polished nudes where male and female area distinguished only by their sexual attributes, but do not differ in their expressive characterizations. Look, for example, at the painting La mano nell’acqua (the hand in the water) where the couple appearing in an open structure –let’s call it a window- have clear facial and anatomical similarities. Of course we can distinguish between the two components of the couple. Pizzorno does not intend to assimilate them, but rather to insert them in a clean and limpid atmosphere where the heavy aspects of the flesh are transfigured through intellectual symbolism. Similar remarks could be made about the settings in which her figures are placed: landscape – let’s call them that - in which natural caves and buildings are inserted without really becoming a part of it: they are stage sets, theatre, in other word, fiction. This is an explicit statement that art is always fiction, and for that reason it expresses deep and intense meditations on the meaning of life through metaphor. These remarks are also pertinent to those iconographical elements represented by rocks as I have already mentioned: these are depicted in contorted shapes full of holes, twisted around one another, perforated, in a very different way from the smooth and compact representation of the anatomical figures. The most immediate interpretation of this contrast is that the human figure 2 imposes itself on its natural context for its superior purity – the purity of the spirit, perhaps, but which may indicate the superiority of intellectual values in general. If we were to seek a conventional definition for this type of painting, we could include it within the historical continuum of metaphysical painting; but it most striking aspect is the successful use of a transparent idiom, structurally simple, and the extraordinary manual skill involved in rendering the complex plasticity of the matter: the pastels take on a dramatic softness, and reveal that within the rocks depicted lies a mysterious sweetness. Somewhere between the classical and the monstrous, the intellectual and the fantastic, Pizzorno continues to develop her enthralling idea of art: in which – I hope this commonplace but fundamental remark will be forgiven – extraordinary skill serves refined culture and an inspired imagination.

 

Translation by Gabriele Tonne