The faraway insides of Giuliana Gironi

 

      Once upon a time ... Thus begin the stories which pretend to be imaginary whereas they draw their own sources from us. Isn't that what Giuliana Gironi tells us by bringing out, from her large magic squares, a world, at first sight, dreamlike?

      The layers of meaning are superimposed on it with delicacy or energy, like so many calls came from "faraway insides" dear to the poet Henri Michaux. Strata upon strata, they are an image of the passing of time, as were, for underground miners, those of the coal walls, shimmering with strength and beauty. Isn't the top also the bottom? Lightness, the echo of heaviest? The ethereal that of the terrestrial? This duality, inside-outside, is here magnificently transcended.

      Layed one by one with the patience of mother of old who embroidered, by hands on the loom, their loneliness or their confinement, the colors, often ruptured, evoke a spice-time oscillating between dream and real life, half light and mindful.

            A fluidity animates the artist's long pictorial apneas coupled with a breath coming from her intimate forge.

Gaston Bachelard would have liked these evocations in which Giuliana Gironi combines the elements, especially since he has analyzed the field of dream for long. We then enter without hesitation into the artwork offered as a mirror turned towards our own story. And when the gaze penetrates deeper into the thickness of recomposed, remodeled subjects, characters arise - beasts, little girls, chimeras - who evolve in a mythical, secret, unlimited, impassable garden, as what separates what we are from what that  we have been.

      Yes, to imagine is to raise the real in a tone¹. To paint is transcending the limits of being to enter a timeless which does not fall within any science-fiction. Who, on the contrary, aspires, here and now, to touch, to stir up, to shake, to help, to wake up the little Alice, lost or abandoned in each of us.

      Making this travel with an elf, a deer, a butterfly, a doe, a meadow, a forest, is to pledge allegiance to fragility, to weave praise for it to guarantee humanity and protect oneself from barbarity which threatens everywhere. Poetry, surreality, musicality, brotherhood of the liveliness! Sister of the grass, of the bird, of beauty, Gironi, with all her embodied, sensual and mastered tenderness, lead us to overcome our anxieties to make life singing. Her world, supple and sumptuous goes beyond what assigns us. Entering into her paintings, to sliping down between the memory of wallpaper and the choreography of possibilities. this is what her acrylic metaphors invite us to do and about which much could be said.

      The metarmophosis will be there, because any artwork, worthy of the name, has the secret mission of modifying what, inside us sclerotic by daily life, failed to open.

      So, let's etche her poetic paintings in our minds, like so many tales to stand up daydreaming!

                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              © Béatrice Libert 2020

                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     ¹ Gaston Bachelard "L'air des songes"   

 

 

Artistic approach

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I like the large size canvases, it gives me the feeling of evolving into my own world when i paint. I chose acrylic for its quick-drying quality which make my technique easier. My experience with etching gave me a taste for printed textures, I like the shadow carved on the paper around the lines inked by the pressure of the plate and which gives this look of relief.  For a long time, i tryed to obtain it in my painting via different techniques but it's thanks to a work of rewriting all my forms with fine marker that I manage to obtain this illusion of overprinting and sometimes even of weaving. With this result I want to give my work a greater personal style, as lace. My compositions are almost always built on an old floral patern, it creates a bridge between the past and the present.

 

I have  passion for nature, animals, flowers,  elements, I am amazed with the wild beauty of our planet and I feel very small in this extraordinary world. i love the idea that every being is part of a whole, that we are atoms of a greater entity such as nature or the cosmos. This is expressed in the treatment of the different elements making up my paintings, leading to the interweaving of subjects and objects in the background, as though permeated in the depths of the strata.

I am also drawn to the world of childhood and its fears, to those distant reminiscences that drives our existence. I like to remember these old perceptions and try to poetically redefine this bygone but omnipresent past.

Animals, pure and innocent, which I present as observers of our activity on this earth, silently populate my world.

                                                                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         © Giuliana Gironi

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