Tessoscritture
Everything is weightless in these latest works of Maria Grazia De Stefani, perfectly corresponding to the contemporary culture that plays again with the recapturing of softness, conceptuality, delicacy and sound as if we were always in front of a video. Light are certain sheets of white paper that infact become screens on which the old figurative image full of paint is nullified, leaving space to minimal signs, writings, and weavings.
The bi-dimensional surface is stitched once or twice and almost always is divided into two parts. It was the hand of a skilled weaver who has patiently sown the contours with colored woolen yarns, as if pushed by a necessity to underline the supports using materials even «warmer» than color, whatever it might be. The artist has willingly transformed herself into a refined artisan who, being afraid of an excessive order, sometimes leaves the colored yarns hanging loose, as if they were remainders of umbilical cords with her newborn creatures, thus being sure of always being able to pick up the leash again for the pleasure of touching or feeling them once more, in a continuous reappropriation through the touch.
After the preparation of the supports-screens the artist, with the same sophisticated craftmanship, continues to construct the lightest images of vests, in a playful succession of different replicae, so that minimal breastplates for our body (all or partially knitted) become apparent to us.
And variations of the theme serve to underline that the vests are many shields to fend against the world and the fear that it often can provoke. They are only light suggestions among which sometimes happen various «objects trouvés». Everything vibrates: from the light papers to the impalpable woolen layers, in a most refined dialectic aiming to de-materialize all the excesses of paint to which we have been used to until recently. Therefore the artist prefers to play on transparencies and rarefactions, also opening the doors to sound.
M.G. De Stefani infact does not paint but, in the wake of many artists of «Arte povera», writes and disseminates personal phrases in all of her works. The word comes to assume a particular weight, thanks also to the form that it takes: hard and strong like that drawn from the graphics of the Twentics. In that way a double memory lives together contemporaneously with that of forms from a near past and that of a private world of the artist, fished out of her flights of memory, as we have well seen in her preceding poetic production. But one knows that today one can, or better, must be a poet in a free manner, always ready to play upon a «nuovissima» intraverbality that prefers words and phrases welded one to another, or well «sonorized» through a particular recitation. And indeed this is what happens with the messages contained in these works which not only have to be read and deciphered as if they were a rebus, but that must also rely upon our voice.
All of a sudden we realize that the lightness of these works bear in themselves a particular «quantum» of different stimuli; we cannot infact stand there looking only in a passive way, but we must give sound to the work in order to understand it thoroughly.
So, the writings: LONG FRAIL LOOSE LULLABY and EARLY MORNING LULLABY lull us gently, precisely like lullabies. The artist has offered us, through deceit, an assemblage of printed letters that we (and only we) can decipher by becoming more active and engaging our sensorial baggage. At the same time, as I have said, we are always tempted to touch the «warm» hanging yarns and to pass them through our fingers, as if they were many most delicate «memories». And therefore, the work that is being offered to us, becomes, with the passing of time, also ours, just because we are gently pushed to confront ourselves, both for our intraverbal research that makes us «work» with words, and for the direct contact with the soft material of the work's various parts.
Often the writings are veiled and partially hidden by several layers of paper or woven wool, in such a way that the reading of the ensemble takes place at successive times, little by littie, even though often we are helped by particular emphasis, being obtained by yarned stitches or by zippers. The dressed work is ready now to be decodified in order to return to its virtual nakedness.
In other cases, on the contrary, phrases are perfectly legible and wind off along undulating itineraries, like in the candid KISSES SWEET KISSES. Here the minimal interruption of the reading is due to two red lips that blossom in the center of the work and that at once underscore the title. It is a kitsch insertion in the middle of so much whiteness, placed there precisely to serve as an element of breakage, as are the scissors down below. These latter are not only one of the tools of craftmanship, as we have seen several times in the work of Jim Din or many other artists of «Arte povera», but they represent conceptually a strong element of breakage, or of a fear of breaking the gentle message tied to a history of affects. They stay there, ready to cut the logical yarn of the phrase.
Sometimes, instead, in the whiteness of the support appear warm colors that take the place of the minimal variations of whites and greys. This is the place where there appears a yellow vest partially veiling a red balloon of transparent paper, as a sort of pulsating heart.
At this point the colors of life and exuberance enter in: THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER is so strong that the writing in the veiled parts becomes more powerful, heavier and darker. Once again the artist plays with writing alternating between soft and hard, full and empty, between light and dark, public and private, pulling us gently with her yarns to participate actively in a last summer remembrance of her own.
Alessandra Borgogelli
Bologna, february 3, 1993
When the word is a sign
The word loses its primary significance when enclosed within a visual space. Even if the impulse to creation of the work may be the semantic value, this then scatters and becomes a sign - the verbal content modifies and nullifies itself to re-create a different one that prolificates in its gesture.
The semantic value is important, but if it remains such in a painting context, it becomes and remains literature. If, on the contrary, it loses its connotations, then it reveals a new language.
What does it matter then what is written with that now printed now long-hand graphy? Nothing more. It might be a reminder of a title.
Now it is only a sign.
There it is, the passage that allows the use of graphic symbols in the context of visual art. This is exactly what is now being actualized in these recent works of M.G. If the significance of the inscriptions were to prevail then we would have visual poetry trying to free itself of its ties. Now M.G., although loving those words that have intrigued hers and others' lives, abandons them to their simple and complex graphic life where verbal simbology loses any referent. Now letters become part of the space that has been conquered by knittings, flowers, tiny toys from a celluloid world. Paper is no longer the designated space for poetry, even visual poetry, but, indeed, it migrates toward that of painting with concrete images and manufactured objects.
That there be non-lived and unknown memories of an art (pop) of years ago is a marginal consideration. That there be a female sensitivity is not relevant because both history and femininity are part of creativity.
«Art develops via reflection of and on preceding art...
... Originality is antithetical to novelty». (George Steiner)
Ginestra Calzolari
Bologna, september 1992
Mythologies and symbolic images
in the works of Mariagrazia De Stefani
The fall of "sacredness" is one of the most remarkable things that has happened during the second half of the century not only in the western social sensorial but also in art, where the metaphysical content has apparently been annulled.
It was not so in the first part of the twentieth century, in periods when, from Mondrian to Kandisky, from Malevic to Klee and Methaphysics, the significance of the image recalled noumenal contents, often of a mysteriousophic nature, such as in the works of Mondrian, whose belonging to theosophic circles is well known.
Nevertheless, a disquieting sacredness has invaded the works of Paolini, Kounellis and Pascali, not less than those of Luthi, Patella and Gina Pane.
Here, essentially, one is dealing with disguises of reality, in which a new mythology appears, either through the body or through works that evoke ethno-anthropological archetypes. They establish symbolic connections that not only imply links with unconsciousness, but also with practices which, although remaining on the ground of quotidianity and in the sphere of the "mundane" presence, invoke disturbing phantoms.
It is on this wake of revival of conceptual imagery that De Stefani has grabbed onto both a visual expression of ancient austerity and of current symbolism: the icon of a disquieting garb which, even in advertising praxis, often represents a corporal synecdoche.
Moving from mythopoietic fabulations implied in the nulling power of the word - actually, of the poetic phrase - that always has the force to capture shimmers of reality and to confer a character of universality and of eternity that often is only latent in the image (which in order to find the same efficacy requires a pregnant iconological reference) the artist, with ability, avails herself of that representation which in the imagery of contemporaneity evokes sentiments of authority and austerity. This also takes on a character of majesty when it becomes a symbol of rationality in the struggle against "bestiality" par antonomasia: it is in fact the principal garment of toreadors. Here one doesn't want to recall obsolete past-feminist problematics; but the liberating image offered by the recent works of De Stefani conclude a path that started some years ago.
However, in the papers exhibited in 1993, De Stefani almost deliberately proposed her "handmade" works as a conquest of her imaginary personal practice. Today we have one image, reiterated and reproposed as a reference point of an internal poetic that wants anything but to be removed: the symbol must resuscitate internal wounds, but exhibit public sacredness.
De Stefani has succeded in overcoming the dangers of creativity as a reparation, establishing safe connections with the artistic practice of masters who have inserted the word, and therefore the pressure of the hand - actually its liveliness - as deuteragonist in the composition of the image. The first comparison that comes to mind is that of Gastone Novelli.
It is a challenge to craftmanship, that which Dorfles calls "today's desuete practice"that survives only in the irremediably élitarian universe of the work of art. It is art which, if it stili wants to maintain its own statute, has to preserve - jealously - its peculiar values, which are those of the extreme dramaturgical game of roles in a revival of an all "private" sacrality that - often and notwithstanding the liberatory utopias - the social practice tends to trample.
Paola Serra Zanetti
Bologna, march 11, 1995