Fabulae (Tales)
Dino Marangon
Just as with the fairytales we were told as children, whose true meanings we probably cannot recall apart from the memory of our bedroom or the cosy atmosphere of our old kitchen, so too, in order to enter the world of Luciana Cicogna, it is perhaps necessary to refer to her pre-history: to the hidden or, in many ways, invisible or unnoticed phases of her work. Perhaps for the sudden delight in colour, perhaps for the need to leave signs of her presence around her, or perhaps even to defend herself from the inhuman greyness of our everyday environment, Luciana Cicogna loves to colour large areas of often very light and impalpable paper with watercolours, tempera and pastels. It is precisely from these already fully personalised papers that the most well-known and explicit path of her subtle creativity originates. Rejecting any passive distancing in the self-satisfaction of contemplation, they are immediately incorporated into new behaviours and actions and, cut, torn and lacerated, the resulting fragments are immediately recomposed into new and complex aggregations, in search of unprecedented, unstable and sometimes even acrobatic equilibriums.
Filtered and reinvented through the pigments and colours of painting, these mobile ensembles will then acquire ever greater consistency and solidity, while in the enchanted synchronism of the work, anxieties and expectations, feelings and reflections emerge in rhythmic agreements and conjunctions of transparent and opaque, light and heavy, free and delimited. Beyond the analysis of forms and colours, beyond the emphasis on intervals, silences and spatial pauses, the boundaries between interiority and the outside world tend to fade, while the multiple discoveries, fantasies, anxieties, expectations, dreams, memories and projects of a complex sensibility emerge and acquire new evidence. Significant echoes and familiar flavours thus insinuate themselves, with ever greater insistence, into the suspended atmosphere of the painting: it is no coincidence that even the children’s drawings, with their strong and concise richness of meaning, sometimes become part of the work, while the forms and images, without losing themselves in intellectual conjectures or abandoning themselves to the blind flow of languages and entities, make increasingly frequent use of unexpected veils, secret luminosities, sudden, virtual breakthroughs that enrich the scene with imperceptible narrative tensions, tacit dialogues, ever-new magic and fairytale modulations. Ready to welcome, beyond mere superficiality, the multifaceted event of affections and things, with feminine wisdom, Luciana Cicogna thus intends to maintain, even through painting, her intimate trust in the very human, difficult and sometimes arduous search for a more solid and profound, albeit a priori indefinable, existential order.
Dino Marangon
