Critical texts
A kind of hidden sacrality breathes over these papers
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The composition (which is always a moment of the creative act in its material and ideal substantiality) has become rarefied to the point of cleverly harmonising colours and spaces and rhythms in accordance with the skills of excavation and sounding which bring these experiences inside the poetry of the informal which is typical of the last decades.
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But, apart from the fact that every artist is linked to their tradition and time, it sometimes happens that in Ms Brescianino, who is cultured and attentive to details, the ancient flight from classical impressionism towards "abstract impressionism" which coincided with the profound distrust of the cognitive and rational values that characterised an age, can be repeated independently. Therefore: "disenchantment" painting….., an urge for a more difficult but more authentic search for the truth, the disappearance of the faces almost coincides with a more generalised recovery of lost values and even with a more anxious need to retrace the cosmic origins of that human adventure which must have surely had an initial and controversial dawn.
Of course the various "births of the sea" confirm this, as does also the "cosmic bewilderment"; and the language was obliged to adapt itself to these risky hypotheses, which are also lyrical, so that the small blue space that explodes in one point of the canvas is only the synthesis of a vast idea that joins all things at their "point of beginning", even if Ms Brescianino has no myths or gods to turn to with thanks or cursing.
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A kind of hidden sacrality seems come and go out of these canvases, authentically laical but wrapped in the silence of discretion...
Clementina Brescianino. Welcoming places
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Clementina discards again and to produce the stratifications of the glance and of memory in the form of metaphor, she prefers the articulation of architectonic space to terrestrial tectonic aspects, caught in those single parts that according to rhetorical synecdoche are valid for all, as they perceptively "suggest" the whole. So here the atmospheric magic of the external passes to the internal, to allow the artist to speak of herself with that reserve and moderation which anyway belong to her and accompany every image of hers. On a visual level perhaps what attracts most is the refined contrast between the coarse grained texture of the surface of the painting so spreading and fluid, and the clear elements of the architectonic forms silhouetted, almost rearing up in, the background.
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It is a refuge for the senses and thought the physiognomy and borders of which Clementina traces with yellow ochre arches - or basalt black or limestone white ones which are defined and project with effects that are almost "trompe-l'oeil"; and the artist concentrates on the essence, the most intimate and secret character of this ideal place, on the sense of life springing from it - and the more controlled and disciplined it is, the more intense and satisfying it is. Her mind, trained to the most lucid rationality but nourished on sensitivity and fantasy, can find itself under these vaults and its dreams, maybe fears, maybe perplexity, maybe unexpressed hopes: certainly many, very many questions.
This sense of doubt, of a search which is unsatisfied as much as satisfied, is part of the artist as a highly-educated woman and creator of images and brings the two apparently distinct parts of her personality together again.
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Yet another element must be underlined: the construction of the artist does not go ahead block by block, using repetitive modules added one after the other like in a castle made of cubes; her special personal architecture is based on mathematics of the spirit freed into that very high form of poetic rationality that music is, the harmonic phrase, the following of one sound on another, relaxation, wrapping oneself in sounds. In this way, thanks to a secret alchemy which is as always a process of transformation, the chromatic tone becomes musical tone, the image flows from one visual margin to the other; it finds a silent bend and starts flowing again as if in a whisper; and then again it is caught up in the shade, and flees upwards; it becomes petrified, explodes, goes back to the fluid state, complying with that tonal dexterity which is the artist's, she who does not relinquish the visible (a strong even if fine way to hang on to the real) but knows how to sing its praises and lighten it in a liquid atmosphere of light, where - as she herself confides - everything can happen.
A passage towards elsewhere
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Slumbering metaphors are recalled into the light of sense; etymons by now mislaid
beneath the banality of re-interpretation are brought back to life, with their original values
restored; signs emerge that declare themselves and their own well-finished elegances,
without aspiring to any value other than their own; architectural balances which are
sustained by purely selfreferential calculations; and chromatic dialogues that are wholly
free from the deceit of having to simulate non-existent atmospheres. Because above all
what count here are the explorative journeys and forays into the world-below, which
Clementina develops along the river-beds of the new researches.
These are pathways of poetry and dreams, but also of thought and cognition. And they are
anyway – however one wishes to interpret them – a surpassing force, the direction of
which is at once transcendental and reasonable, where such reason, however, is
tempered by an awareness of the unconscious.
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For the polemical negative premises of abstract art and its theoretical coherence are
absent here.
Or, if one prefers, what is lacking is that radical separation of the image which sanctions
the defining crisis of meaning and opens a way to more systematically self-referential
languages. On the contrary, because Clementina’s “productions” do not exercise an a
priori Elimination of the image, but only has it break up in directions which point towards an
increase in the value of the world-below, it would be more appropriate in this case to talk of
a research charged with surrealist suggestions and poetic openings which are in some
way prompted by temptations of a metaphysical nature. And if the differences from
abstract art can be clearly revealed in the quality of a colour which is all but ignorant of the
rigidity of timbric values, but which gushes forth with a strong and lyrical accentuation,
above all in the fan of tonal nuances, then the affinities with surrealism and with the
surrealism’s metaphysical meanings are evident in the wafting presence of various
symbolic components as well as in the same semantic over-enlargement which, in
outline at least, the detail has undergone. After all, the power of enchantment emanating
from the detail was, in its turn, a projection whose sense was not concealable, and in fact
was also possessed of a sort of implicit fidelity towards the universe of perception.
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From the silences which inundate the solitude of a cloister or a great nave and from the
knots of half-light that gather with a physical thickness in the corners of a sail, now the
purely allusive rake of an arch, now the mass of a barely sketched-in capital, emerge
slowly and almost spectrally. The iconic consistency of the figurative fragment has from
time to time the exclusive value of a synecdoche and remains, so to speak, pregnant with
the atmosphere which has provoked it. As a single element that must talk for the whole,
this synecdoche is a cipher, a note of diapason – a burst or mingled sound – in which
everything is included. And disappears, leaving in its wake indeterminable traces of
something which might be the ghostly life-spirit of the whole. But this something is a
spectral something only in so far as its fleeting nature is concerned, or the signs utilized to
evoke it. Because otherwise, the enlargement of that fragment of memory becomes a wide
territory for a material-chromatic exploration; an alchemist’s laboratory for analyses
designed to demonstrate the microcosmic richness of the detail.
If one is prepared to enter into the spirit of this game of a slow analytical breaking
down of the world-below, then the sensation is one of a magical immersion in the galaxies
of the microphysical universes of matter. And it was not by chance that, as we suggested
above, there exist here – simile by simile – shades of Alice’s journeyings between logical
deduction and awareness of the subconscious.
There is in all this something hanging over one from elsewhere or, if one prefers, the
threat of an extraneousness which is continually breaking through, to disturb even the
most ordinary surfaces.
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From a purely objective viewpoint, one may solely appreciate the relationship of subtle
continuities which these tendentially iconic moments have with the moment of the portrait
and with its resultingly dominant cypher. In its existential meanings the pregnant presence
of elsewhere, that we have alluded to above, is in almost no way different from the way in
which the images of the portraits hall always from the space behind the subject’s
shoulders, and that presence is felt constantly as an inseparable component of the vision.
Also in this presence there exists a source; and in each case the key-term common to both
is the “elsewhere”.
Might it not be for Clementina, as for some unquiet poet concerned with the very
nature of the existence and the relations between things, that existence, before being the
horizon of what has been “lived”, is above all the condition for an ex-sistere, or rather a
being fallen in a faraway time? Is there a difference between this original prefix (the ex- of
existere) and the “elsewhere”? “
Time as spiritual space
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Brescianino ... lives her esprit de finesse intensely, investigating the nature of her own thought, meeting points and silences of doubt without any drama.
…It is just this subtle lightness that basically makes up the fascinating elegance of the material and the sign in her paintings where colour has symbolic, orphic, recitative and ideal meanings.
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The surface on which the artist deposits shapes and hue is a contributing part of the work. It is imperfect, we are convinced, in this case to call the most sensitive composition of the card that hosts the images so carefully worked out by this artist indifferent supports: in fact the material, the padded, wrinkled weave of this precious means, becomes one with the image, in part determining it and in part forming a visible component which can be appreciated by touch and sight. Her search, from an iconographic point of view, is presented through images of the antique. They are traced using paper made by hand imitating the ancient way of producing it: coherence which is not just chance if it so clearly determines the expressive integrity obtaining perfect symbiosis between "thing" and "how".
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It is "difficult" art, that of Clementina Brescianino, not easily perceptible even though, as always happens where poetry is revealed, it appears persuading and fascinating in the way it presents itself with its soft tension.
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In the observation of Clementina Brescianino's paintings two possible interpretive misunderstandings can occur. The first is to interpret her images as traces of a reality being formed, things that are "becoming" or growing, or becoming better defined: in this way should expect her progressive coming closer to the descriptive representation towards mimetic and illustrative painting in which the environmental traces would end up showing us the objects in their entirety. The second misunderstanding, on the contrary, is to believe in the opposite course and that is that what appears now in the paintings corresponds to a process or reduction by allusion where the symbol reigns, as an ideogram, logo, part of all, a
mnemonic reference, allusive reference: in this way we expect her open entry into the abstractive area. These are easy approaches to complex art which instead requires a stringent, reserved dialogue, not superficial, and also demands dilated observation time in contrast with so much now prevalent painting based on the cry, drama and the sneer.
Clementina Brescianino is an artist "outside time", and not because she is behind or ahead, but in that her representations do not go through time in the two dimensions I have mentioned proceeding "towards" or "going back to".
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the artists, consciously, are already determining results in their choice of the materials and instruments with which they start work... It is then indisputable that the technical consideration must fundamentally affect critical judgement. In Clementina Brescianino's work this aspect has a determining valency: the comprehension of her images would be incomplete without an investigation of the poetic motivation of her technical choice. The artist uses material with a liquid appearance, hard to manage, obtained through a personal procedure that uses pastel powders and does not favour a well-defined line. It is absolutely unsuitable for achieving fixed images and tends to destructure the perspective conception. The fluidity, the transparency, the tendency to spread offer the artist evocative and atmospheric possibilities that are vague, indefinite and the ability to catch lights and shades that are free of clear-cut limits and that are anyway held back by the paper gorges. The liquid morphology of material deposits more or less colour, limiting the symbiotic expansion between one colour and the adjacent. Basing herself on these values, the artist places rare but determined signs, adding new material, without liquid, or, through overlapping collage layers: "concrete" emergencies, lines of ground, or horizon, in short, offering a perspective grip for the eye where it can stop, to avoid bewilderment in that lost space, without borders, disturbing and magically evanescent.
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Clementina Brescianino devises a spatiality that tends more and more to ignore Euclidean co-ordinates, going away from the physical conception of place and on towards a cosmic concept, which intuits a spiritual extension into time