Paola Tettamanti

 

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The totally non-iconic painting by Paola Tettamanti (who is however in secrecy a skilful mimetic drawer) arises from chromatic impulses, chemical and psychological affinities: it happens with those who see the reality and look at the multicoloured, evermoving world (inside and into the eyes). Made strong by her own invasive (and pervasive) "egology", the painter from Umbria talks with the empathy of the chromatic clots and knots, through the synaesthesia which underlines her pictorial texture, so that, to paraphrase Bergson and his "vital burst", not life but art is a free and unceasingly, unpredictable creation. Hers is, indeed, a mental matter, but at the same time an extratextual, elusive "rational emotion". Her wild shorthand-graphs (abstract fury) do not celebrate the servile imitation of reality, but its expressionistic outburst. So that in her feverish (active) painting you do find the whole space - conquered as a frantic pentagram, counterpointed by acrilic-paint dripping and sprinkling - nonetheless the whole, i.e. the strictly "untitled" compositions, are not gesture but mind music. The various chromatic contrasts, sometimes like symphonies sometimes like sonatas, which run along the canvas – sign and brushstroke, spatula and drop – eventually run after one another, interlace, uncoil, swell in a labyrinth of sounds and segments, style touches and fragments, phonems and morphems; in short, a sort of pictorial Esperanto made of many languages. It is no more possible then to distinguish between the Informal and the Action Painting atmosphere, which stay at the background, in the DNA of Paola Tettamanti’s painting. What is clear is therefore that even the most casual gesture seems – through mysterious ways – to be thought by the hand which follows (executes) the thinking. Moreover, her painting turns out as a mystical sense of physical presence, energy struggle, muscle tone. The artist enters the canvas, rapes it through colour strokes, non-euclydean stratification, tache and ribbons, spirals and scribbles. Neither figure nor shape. Nor object. Only colour. Paola Tettamanti’s painting can be either loved or rejected. Tertium non datur.
It is of use now to quote an "aphorism" by Paolo Giulio Argan: "The artist exists and he exists because he acts: he does not say what he must or wants to do in and for the world, it is on the world’s part to give a sense to what he does".
 

by Antonio Carlo Ponti