33 32 In Giusy Lauriola’s creative horizon, clouds direct the observer’s gaze towards further contaminations. In her work Prendiamo il sentiero paludoso per arrivare alle nuvole (We take the marshy path to the clouds), painting and installation follow an introspective iter that comes from the evocation of a haiku. The very essence of Lauriola’s work is condensed in this metaphorical sentence that alludes to the difficulties of an untrodden path, and to the final destination represented by detachment. For Lauriola, panting is always a meditative moment that places her in the presence of the deepest part of the Ego. This, at least, is the premise. Her painting distances itself from the mimetic expression of reality, but rather translates the constant tension that animates her research. The experimentation that Lauriola has been carrying out for twenty years, step by step, tends towards simplification through the reduction of descriptive elements, focusing in her most recent works on graceful figurines wrapped in old–fashioned clothes. But even the use of a palette with a rather limited number of colours, blues, orange pinks with the introduction of yellows, greens and reds, is part of a vision that aims at new expressions of inner landscapes. Each colour, as Max Lüscher teaches with his psychological theory in relation to emotions, is consecrated to a feeling, an emotional impulse. However, what makes the result unique and unrepeatable is the presence of a material apparently extraneous to the context, synthetic or epoxy resin, which manages to establish a stimulating dialogue with the acrylic colours, the enamels, the bitumen and, of course, the canvas and the artist’s hand that visually translates her thoughts. The immediacy of the gesture is bridled in the density of the resins, thermosetting polymers that take part in the artistic process in the role of active witnesses, themselves guardians of the memory of the action. It is almost an oxymoron: slow and fast, this is how the process is animated with the stratification and the passage of the resin from the liquid to the solid state. At the same time spectator and protagonist of the magic of creation, Giusy Lauriola, whose mastery of the technique comes from constant, daily practice, adapts to times that are slow and immediate in transforming the instant into eternity. In her work, there is also the unpredictability of the mutability of form, accidental, sudden, which itself becomes an active presence on the two dimensional support. This gives rise to new shapes with undefined borders, just like clouds. Manuela De Leonardis NEW SHAPES WITH UNDEFINED BORDERS, JUST LIKE CLOUDS Visiting a solo exhibition can give us the gift of making an itinerary through the sensitivity of an artist; sensations and emotions through sign and colour are distilled on the canvases, opening our eyes to other worlds and perspectives. In this way, the artist acts as a modern shaman, inducing the spectator to reflect and acting as a trait d’union with otherworldly dimensions. All this can be seen in the works by Giusy Lauriola that form the corpus of the exhibition Prendiamo il sentiero paludoso per arrivare alle nuvole (We take the marshy path to the clouds). The works exhibited here present themselves to the observer as metaphysical landscapes dripping with pictorial matter, spirituality and sentiment, focused on a chromatic partition that certainly recalls horizons; on these emerge sudden flashbacks of human figures as if they were apparitions from the distant lands of the unconscious and enlivened by a reminiscent sign of psychic automatism in the sense of thought free from the control of reason. The process that led to this result, in an admirable balance between abstraction and figuration, has a distant origin that has its roots in the real and its social dynamics. A reality often studied and examined by the artist in its various forms and addressed pictorially over the years by increasingly reducing the objective and figurative reference. This has been an inversely proportional process, initially latent and unconscious, and then slowly becoming clearer and clearer. In fact, the self– determination and the achievements translated for Lauriola into a subtraction rather than an addition of elements and colour on the canvas. In other words, the security she has achieved has allowed her to go beyond immanent forms, which she feels are superfluous and empty, to dedicate herself to reflection on the ontology of being and nature, which is the real aim of her research. In all this, the title of the exhibition is explanatory, alluding to a path that is certainly not devoid of difficulties and obstacles to reach a higher goal. The title of the series Suspended Atmospheres, to which the canvases in the exhibition belong, is also clarifying. Observing these works, the sensation we perceive is that of atemporal suspension where the flow of time is crystallised. In these visions, the viewer’s attention is drawn into the painting by the small figures placed at the bottom; subsequently, their varying positions and dimensions, through a game of diagonals and unorthodox symmetries, lead the eye towards the border zone where the chromatic extensions with which the artist divides the support come into contact. And it is here that LAURIOLA’S METAPHYSICAL PATHS
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