Luciana Cicogna
Le forme leggere e vaganti (Light and Wandering Forms)
Stefano Cecchetto
«Anche alle nubi, insensibili nubi
che si fanno e disfanno in chiaro cielo;
e ad altre cose leggere e vaganti».
Umberto Saba, Ritratto della mia bambina.
(“Even to the clouds, insensitive clouds
that form and dissipate in the clear sky;
and to other light and wandering things.”
-Umberto Saba, Portrait of my little girl.)
At the Beginning
An anthological exhibition of a contemporary artist always marks a turning point in the artist’s career and raises questions about their future: is it time to stop? Or is it simply a summary of their work to date?
In the case of Luciana Cicogna, it is only a pause, a moment of reflection to take stock of fifteen years of work exhibited in an orderly progression, not only chronologically, but also marked by the different themes addressed over the last decade.
In light of the CGIA Purchase Prize won at the recent edition of the Mestre Prize with the painting entitled Punto di vista (Point of View), it is only right to document the other Purchase Prizes received from the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in 1979, 1982 and 1983, followed by a scholarship in 1984.
Starting from where it all began, Luciana Cicogna took part in the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa group exhibitions as early as 1975, presenting two works: Natura n.1 and Natura n.2, thus confirming a personal approach to nature that would become the leitmotif of much of her subsequent career.
The Bevilacqua La Masa group exhibitions saw her return in 1977 with two more paintings: Composizione in rosa and Presenza. In 1978, she won her first Purchase Prize with the work Spazio-Immagine 2. In these works from the 1970s, Luciana Cicogna recomposes geometries in persistent shifts of meaning until the evolution of a visual perception that is always poised between form and matter, between concept and its figuration.
The 1980 and 1981 editions reveal a turning point in her language, as the geometries begin to give way to an abstraction that addresses a different cubist examination. In the paintings of the 1980s, the composition revolves around a compact central core, and it is the rotational motion impressed upon this core that develops the form in the chromatic variations of the sign. This can already be seen in the titles of those years: Spazio immagine n. 3 (Image Space No. 3) and Spazio immagine n.4 (Image Space No. 4); Memoria (Memory); Entrando nel rosa (Entering Pink); and then in those of 1981, where Luciana Cicogna presented I love you and Lievi movimenti (Slight Movements), with which she won that year’s Purchase Prize, two works that reveal a solid expressive maturity and a renewed sensitivity to the space of intervention.
The 67th Collective Exhibition, in 1983, saw the artist now moving towards new expressive languages in which geometries are recomposed in a vision that introduces elements of nature and a small heart enclosed within an “imperfect” square: Love love and La scatola magica (The Magic Box). The 1983 edition also reserved a new Purchase Prize for the painting Senza titolo 1 (Untitled 1) and paved the way for a conscious shift towards the narration of a suspended time that alludes to representing archaic memories, translated into an irresistibly modern language.
1984 was the year that closed the cycle of group exhibitions at Bevilacqua La Masa, and at that year’s exhibition, Luciana Cicogna presented two works, winning a scholarship for the painting: Tra cielo e terra (Between Heaven and Earth).
After the rewarding experience of the Bevilacqua La Masa exhibition, the artist embarked on a mature professional career focused on the search for new forms suggested by a metamorphic vision of nature.
These were years of collaboration with important Italian and foreign art galleries, in exhibitions where her painting found a personal balance of forms and colours and attracted the interest of important critics, including Giuseppe Marchiori and Toni Toniato, who in one of his presentations emphasised the artist’s modus operandi, now free from preconceived patterns:
«In recent years, her painting has settled into a free unfolding of vast chromatic frequencies, symbolically referable to the realm of earth and sky, in a conception that retraces allusive elements of a fantastic cosmology. These are purely imaginative “landscapes”, but with intense evocative power and elegant analogies of a perceptual and conceptual nature. They are invented forms, but they come from introspective explorations into the world of nature, borrowed for both phenomenal and emotional stimulation and correspondences.»
Toniato’s lucid observation encompasses Luciana Cicogna’s entire oeuvre from the late 1980s to the present day, where the subjects are reflected in the observation of nature in order to capture the perception of the moment. In the confluence of these moments, in their consonant harmony and in that world where things repeat themselves in the temporal cycles of everyday life, Luciana Cicogna looks at the landscape with an eye extracting from it only a few elements, a few recognisable symbols: the bark of a tree, the appearance of a Saracen moon and a few other components of a vision that alternates between presence and memory. This is also because the artist’s point of view is able to open up a semicircle and, in the infinite distances between painting and nature, the sign becomes familiar and strange, familiar and unusual.
Natural and contingent reality in this personal, self-contained universe, bent to the sign of a pre-established harmony, enters the painting, cautiously filtered, in aerial forms that dissolve into the calm vision of the pictorial whole.
Matter and form in free will
The exhibition at Palazzetto Tito brings together the artist’s last fifteen years of work with an appendix dedicated to the 1970s for the rediscovery, with hindsight, of the promising origins of her research. The works from those years reveal a personal and balanced demon for geometry, drawn up in a scrupulously elaborate order, within which Luciana Cicogna reveals a calm compositional evidence and a particular attention to colours: from greenish blues to light blues, from opaque pinks to bright reds, which refer to the wisdom of ancient alchemical procedures.
The exhibition then moves forward in time to the cycle of Moons, reassuring presences of a feeling that finds, in the night-time, a serene propensity to revisit space for a personal perspective. Che fai tu luna in ciel, dimmi che fai (What are you doing, moon in the sky, tell me what you are doing), the artist seems to ask, quoting Giacomo Leopardi, in her exploration of a subject that, without departing from the canon of space-time-movement relationships, nevertheless confirms a personal dialectic of form and colour. Because we cannot forget that Luciana Cicogna remains, above all, an artist who is always searching, in her perception of matter and in the glimmer of colours, for a simultaneity of balance between the subject and the pictorial space. Behind the alchemy of her Moons, it is possible to glimpse a light substrate of small, imperceptible signs that only emerge when the gaze shifts and encounters an intermittent reflection of light. Enriched by the skilful application of gold leaf, the Moons sway around the perimeter of the canvas like castaways in multicoloured skies that determine the elsewhere of our experience, inasmuch as art belongs to the “spiritual heritage” of each of us and, if this were not the case, it would probably have no reason to exist.
Non è che ci siamo persi? (Have we lost our way?) Visitors to the exhibition may wonder as they move from one room to another; but the artist knows the way and indicates it with a few decisive marks on the canvas. Luciana Cicogna’s arrows remain visible clues to secret paths, now revealed by a map of colours that aid visual orientation and reveal the vital exuberance of her pictorial seasons.
Losing and then finding oneself, as if through the squares of a “snakes and ladders” that lead to a sign rich in archaic, tactile, auditory and sonorous emotions, from which the artist’s imagination draws on the memory of her own experiences.
“Leave the certain for the uncertain”, stated Alighiero Boetti in the title of one of his series of works, and the uncertain is the terrain on which Luciana Cicogna continually moves in search of new stimuli and different poetic sensibilities to update her work.
This concept gives rise to numerous variations of a pictorial sentiment that delves deep – between past and future – to cancel out time until it reaches a personal balance between creative imagination and the resulting narrative process that it suggests.
In her natural reluctance to compile a conceptual title that could mislead the interpretation of the image, the artist most often prefers to combine the painting with a direct name that identifies the subject in the background that welcomes it: Moon; Bark; Arrow and bark; Memory of a leaf; Slight Movements. There are no philosophical dogmas at the basis of this recognition, nor moral or snobbish abstractions, because the motives behind the idea are exclusively poetic, expressed through a personal elegy of pictorial form.
The fragments of her modus operandi concentrate and disperse in the instantaneous illusion of a moment; the fleeting instant of a transient thought takes shape within the perimeter of the canvas where emptiness and fullness compensate each other. Matter, in the inextricable paths of abstract language, is then found within the visible of an explicit figuration: the moon is the moon, the bark is bark, and the arrow has no reason to be interpreted differently.
Even when compiling the theme of her most recent paintings, which the artist dedicates to the formulation of a different Point of View, Luciana Cicogna approaches the subject of glasses not as a decorative element, but as emblems of a conceptual vision pervaded by the poetics of silence. Perhaps the time has come to change our point of view, the artist seems to suggest, and look at things with different eyes, since the ineffable nature of art lies precisely in its way of constantly evolving. Because art is ephemeral, it is a meteor that catches us by surprise and then lets us go, bewildered, fascinated or disappointed, in a vortex that consumes itself inside an hourglass of sand.
In each of her paintings, Luciana Cicogna hints at the beginning of a story: there is the background to a genesis and the perceived echo of an end, the alpha and omega of every possible existence.
If the artist confirms herself as a sensitive figure who shines through her work, the creator who tries to stop time will end up exhausting her heart; it is better to rely on the lightness of the moons and the solidity of bark, better to try to live in a slowed-down present rather than chase the unknowns of an exasperated future. Luciana Cicogna is an artist, and she has never shied away from the risky adventures of her craft. Her temperament is constantly seeking an unstable equilibrium, and the purity of her work continually stimulates her to search, to develop her hand and her eye to the point where the slightest breath of her creations becomes the expressive sign of her being an artist: ancient and contemporary at the same time.
