Oils, drawings and engravings

by Mario De Micheli, 1977

The quality of these images by Pizzorno is closely given by their meaning. In other words, it is a purely expressive quality. It sometimes happens, when looking at a piece of work, that the plastic merits, besides or to the side of the theme or subject, appear somewhat autonomous; however, this is not the case with Pizzorno's canvases, where the identity between vision and figurative enunciation appear inseparable.

If, that is, Pizzorno immerses her characters in a limbal light, this rests intimately with the overall sense of the image and not with any other formal concerns. Her "limbo," that is to say, is a metaphor for our condition, our existence: an almost fictitious, suspended existence of life-not-life. As Rimbaud once said, "La vraie via est absente. Nous ne sommes pasa u monde".

Pizzorno's characters are thus characters waiting to live or to revive, as they are drained of all lifeblood, of all spiritual power. Sealed in a chilling silence, forced into perpetual incommunicability, they appear to us like ghosts in phantom settings. Men and women face equal fate, they brush against each other without forming relations; they do not speak; they make enigmatic gestures. It is, therefore, to this vision and judgment of our current reality that Pizzorno's painting informs its quality. The embodiment of the muted cold tone, almost toward the monochromatic; the absence of any chromatic accent; the slow and restrained manner of execution all have their well-founded reason here.

Pizzorno's vision, however, has nothing metaphysical about it. What her canvases offer us is, in fact, a web of alienation, a real condition of our existence. The question is whether this "limbo" could one day burst into a true flow of life, that is, whether these same characters might begin to speak, make gestures with precise meaning, and enter a relationship with each other.

This need for liberation behind Pizzorno's images is undoubtedly present. I would say that it stems from the same consciousness that allows her to paint the very alienation of her characters so sharply. Thus the "negative" is reversed: absence becomes an emptiness that we are called upon to fill.