Art, Life and beyond…

Edizione Eupalino
Collage Cammei
2009
p.115
Stampa A. G. F. Italia

I confess that on perusing the texts of Stefania Carrozzini present in this collection I ended up finding myself, especially during the years spent in the company of the unforgettable Pierre Restany, amongst the lines and folds of art which curl up like a cosmic bundle of ancestral theogony. The life which Stefania proposes, never detached from art, is an adventurous life, richly present to the consciousness where the rising to art is only a practically mandatory step, thus making the first and the second Siamese twins: inseparable. Yet the acute introspections which Stefania Carrozzini undergoes in nearly all her writings, piercing and unexpected, punctual and dismantling, act upon the state-of-the-art like a morning breeze, they bring a fresh wind of novelty, of desire to act, for the present and the future. Charged with optimism they instil in the onlooker a divide between what life is and what it should tend towards. Hanging like cobwebs amongst the shrubs they weave around the topics until they obtain unusual readings, the result of a passionate need in which art reproduces the adventure of life, until it associates with it, highlighting the divergences and the anomalies. In this way Stefania travels around the world, an often hostile world in which she takes part with irony and doubt, with verve and caution, with realism and utopia always searching for something which escapes the rules of rationalism to place itself in a parallel elsewhere in our consciousness, as if this was waiting for none else than to be awakened. And the texts reawaken that which sleeps deeply or dozes in indifference. They are warning signals, unexpected piercing comments, pure vigilance towards the indifference with which we often confront art. An art which for the author leaves her civil sense of human progress intact, an art freed from the tiring strategies of art galleries and auctions, art as a friend and travelling companion which without losing its rightful authority rises to be an existential complement. We know there is no art without life and viceversa, yet to listen once again to such a voice and such a truth with the decisive words of an exceptional regular of this milieu, is as effective a tonic as any medicine. Meandering amongst the topics dealt with in the text, practically a volume one is reluctant to finish, a tangle in which are ensnared the observations on the destiny of the body or the piercing introspections on the rich imagery, confer to the work a syncopated flow which, however, is not so much due to our attention towards a sole topic, as due to the fact of putting art in its factual multiplicity. A sort of cornucopia of an abundance of themes, of prompts and reflections. Behold the strategy employed escapes the entrapments of academicism, of manner, of the jargon of art criticism to become a message in a bottle fruit of a wrecked ship adrift in contemporaneity, a shipwreck which tries in every way to escape the coercive loneliness of contemporary art often exhibited as a stage item, or commercialised by the market, but which acquires a dimension which is at the same time domestic and temporal, planetary or private, an art which the author herself needs as a high symptom of survival in the mare magnum (great sea) of indifference for a much wanted beyond of which Stefania offers us, as in the tunnel painted by Bosch, a glimmer of light.

Marcello Sèstito
Milano-Reggio Calabria
18 giugno 2009