AI MAGAZINE N.71 | FALL ISSUE 2015 | VELVET BLUE ‘THE RESULTING STATE’
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The line is her language
by Giacomo Belloni
In our constant search – going overseas as well – for the latest trends in contemporary art and the most interesting and characterizing creative expressions, we have for some time been studying art in the United Arab Emirates. It is pointless to repeat the reasons, by now so well debated and understood as almost to be taken for granted.
The dome of the Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi is now practically finished and the epic moment of its inauguration draws ever closer; the activities of the Cultural District continue uninterrupted and, at full steam, endless events are organized. This time, to complete what has been written so far while remaining in the Emirates, we focus on a Italian artist who lives, works and exhibits in Dubai: Laura Colantonio, born in 1976. Graduated in Political Science from the Sapienza University in Rome, a specialization from the Rome Fine Art University, past experiences in the world of advertising. A number of exhibitions around the globe under her belt: Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Lisbon, Lon- don, Miami, Turin, and so on. To sum up, Laura has all the credentials to be who she al- ready is: a valued and esteemed artist in the Emirates, in an environment which is dynamic, in rapid evolution and very demanding. Laura works with lines.
The line is her language, her vocabulary, her mode of expression. She sees it as an autonomous and independent entity, in perennial movement within the multidimensional space of perception, in its restless capacity to be the creator of new potential. A continuous line, in incessant dialogue with others, in a harmonious and always equilibrated whole. Her lines are the two-dimensional simplification of complex volumes, synthetic and conceptual projections of special masses of work. The idea always
begins with a voluminous dimension: it is from the
full surrounding spaces
and three dimensional prospective that the profound and skillful work of reduction begins:
the search for the founding principle. Laura is not interested however in flattening three-dimensionality onto a canvas, she looks for a fundamental ontological argument, that which is able to bring to the work the very essence of multidimensionality. The artist’s space becomes a flat surface without ever losing its fullness, without leaving to one side its volumetric quality. It is not a simple projection onto a surface, a banal perspective reduction; she extracts the noumenon, the principal, she dismantles it to then reconstruct it on canvas through a sinuous dance of eloquent traces.
Those who come across her works are enraptured by the colorful surfaces and drawn in by the generating line; they are pulled into her gentle dance to then unwittingly come upon an unconscious work of special reconstruction. As the artist explains: “The eye of the viewer begins to construct elements in 3D by allowing the eyes to flow, to follow the lines on the surfaces [...] I create my works starting from a play of moving lines, lines which I imagine accompanying the viewer as they follow them in their whirling generative paths”.
In this period Laura is in England to continue a new phase in her work, the natural progression of that which she has done until now, that which she considers a necessary step. Now she is studying the lines of commonplace, daily space. The lines which belong to immobile structures, held in real environments, including those created by objects and their shadows: “every corner of living space deserves to be observed, contemplated, understood. It becomes essential to understand in what way the lines meet and how they coexist harmoniously, how they intersect, communicate between themselfes”.
“I make my choices only after an attentive and scrupulous study: I select only a few lines, perhaps only one [...] while I move closer I try to understand how it be- comes, and how much light it has; I try to understand both the nature and the quality”.
Laura Colantonio’s lines therefore seek to be the founding element for complex compositions. In its uniqueness and peculiarity it is never only a simple collection of points which follow one another, but rather the starting lexeme for the redefinition of articulated spatial units, with multiple dimensions, units composed of adjacent and contiguous volumes; when the volumes become finer they become minimal, thin, linear; where they become distant one is able to reach unexpected volumes. If “the straight is the line of mankind, the curve is that of God”, nature never offers examples that are too rigid, they are measured but always sinuous and soft, and as such are complex and not easily reduced into simple schemes. Here is where the artist, as a refined and cultured artist, offers us, through her work, unique creations which, in their composure, cannot fail to attract all to the search for the profoundest of reasons for artistic study.
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NOTA BENE: ARCHIVIOARTE non ha alcun fine di lucro. Ogni proposta qui contenuta ha la sola finalità di promuovere la diffusione dell'arte in quanto considerata patrimonio di tutti e per tutti. Ogni iniziativa, ogni azione ed ogni pubblicazione è autoprodotta e diffusa unicamente per amor di cultura e per il convincimento che la sua condivisione ci possa rendere più ricchi spiritualmente e più liberi.
Nulla di quanto qui pubblicato ha contenuti politici.
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"È vero, principe, che una volta avete detto che il mondo sarà salvato dalla bellezza?" Dostoevski, L'Idiota
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