White Lights – solo show, march 2019.
PXL – University College, Hasselt, Belgium.

White lights.

The drawings are created using the qualities of the materials, by stratifying and overlaying pure white paper, which is both light and thick, fragile and solid. This condition is similar to that of the human being who aspires to reach Heaven, an evanescent place from which no one returns, and that depends on our resigned hope that it actually exists and that it will welcome us. The whiteness of the paper is spontaneously, and I would say intentionally, overbearing. It is almost a chromatic shade, a desired and searched-for light, which gives and communicates something greater about itself. It is the kind of white that reflects and attracts, which draws and absorbs the shades and profiles of the figures that bloom out of the paper, sometimes roughly sketched and sometimes clear and sharp. Softened among the various shades of grey, the drawing reveals itself through symbols, a precise corpus of exegesis, which in some cases comes from the artist’s background, and in others from her intimate sensitivity. Overlapping images are poured over the paper; sometimes clear, but always to discover and locate. The colour, instead, comes out of more recent research. The evocation is vibrant, the connections chase each other and are visible even to the uninformed observer, in that the work contains many clues that lead us to visually immerse ourselves, following in the exact direction of the evolution of the artist’s methodological research. The paradise depicted in the drawings seems, in fact, to be simply light, merely a pretext, a caption-like reference, because these figures are not “heavenly”, they are neither reassuring nor what we would like to find in our ideal ecstatic corner. And at the same time we can also find – in her work, in the complexity of her installations – the “mise-en-scene”, which recalls a theatrical stage or a film set. There is a composition, a framework, which, despite sometimes being accidental, follows an extremely engaging perspective; also a predominant feature of this exhibition. The artist’s research and constant attention cover a wide spectrum, and communicate with the unlimited source of art history, seen through its most peculiar artists; but also with the evolution of the artist’s knowledge and experimentation, through the dynamics of the transformation of her language into her style and distinctive character, from dreams to reality, from inspiration and vocation to artwork.

Alice Rubbini, 2019