Until 20.X.2002

Raffaella FORMENTI

Motore di Ricerca - Search Engine

Livorno, Galleria Peccolo

At the exhibition, closing a series of four different events, all on the same theme: Raffaella Formenti's "Motori di Ricerca" (Search Engines), like the enormous internet archives, become inviting labyrinths full of stimuli, which are different from the ones we were looking for…

Anyone who has started surfing the internet at random has sometimes had the experience of being carried away by one link after another, offered by the various "search engines". The possibility of being able to access anything gives a sensation of getting lost and of risking the silence of excess. This brimming expansion of communication forms the basis of Raffaella Formenti's latest one-man show, aptly called "Motore di Ricerca ".Following the subtle underlying theme of her last four exhibitions which were held in four different Italian cities, the artist from Brescia is now presenting a large-sized installation, accompanied by more than a dozen works, specially created for this exhibition at the Peccolo gallery in Livorno. Already last March in Viterbo, at the Miralli gallery, her peculiar "search engines" created a sort of dress rehearsal, based on an installation she presented last year in Pisa at the San Zeno abbey. Later, in the Scoglio di Quarto gallery in Milan, the view from above allowed her to make a strong impact on the sea of information coming from the world, using a particularly intrusive installation. Now, however, to expand the initial message there are also Formenti's visual sounds, hosted by the fabioparisartgallery in Brescia taking place at the same time as the exhibition in Livorno. Here, the attention is particularly oriented towards the continuous filling up of and influence, also unconsciously, of advertising on our daily lives.But in Livorno the subject of the search engine turns and suggests an enlargement of perspective in order to catch the most beautiful part of art: the contamination. After the fall of the wall between artist and spectator it is now the communication which has become the precious grit which constructs the pearl inside the oyster. So, the effort of drawing out from simple gestures the substance that will interest the public, with the hope of making the work belong a little to everybody - even to people who have never read a book of art history in their life - this effort represents without any doubt Raffaella Formenti's most fascinating challenge. In a certain sense, it could not be different. Raffaela Formenti, in fact, with her painter's eye and real love such as, for Turner's works, has never been afraid to risk to losing herself in the torn posters on the city walls because she understood early - thanks to Rotella - that these forms of expression "are no longer just intrusive paper, but places for painting". Raffaela Formenti brings to her works an extraordinary grace and aesthetic sense of the magnificent opportunity of bypassing different references in order to deepen her vision. So she is always ready to hear new questions, which may generate embryonic answers, like pebbles dropped in a pond. In this context even the ironic yellow boxes shown at Livorno find a place. These boxes, with their strange lateral holes from which postcards, advertising or brochures emerge, become colours for a painter who, instead of going into a paint shop to buy the colours, crushes them directly out of all the paper jumbles that we find in our daily lives, returning, without false modesty and useless prejudices, a delicious lover of that alchemical act, capable of transforming, even today, a split in a work that brings with it new contents.

Until 21.V.2002

Raffaella FORMENTI

Motore di ricerca - Search Engine

Milan, Scoglio di Quarto Gallery

Obsessive gestures of a primitive dexterity which become totem-like constructions with bright colours: that's the poetry of Raffaella Formenti...

The first installations made with packaging material appeared in Brescia between 1992 and 1994, reaching a peak in 1997, with the Information Tower, on show in 1997 at the Palazzo delle Albere in Trento, within the exhibition Trash: when waste becomes art, by Lea Vergine.Hence, it's almost a tradition now for this subject to 'permeate', underground, the urban territory, and then comes "to surface" in "culturally contagious" places, such as thematic bookshops (the Ars in Bergamo, the Derbylius in Milan, etc.).In the iconographic galaxy in which we are immersed (or rather, in which we navigate, as we like to think), waste represents a system and poetics: its engine consists of the solid thought of something discarded and useless which drifts away, stockpiling images, information, expired material. An inexorable centrifugal force compresses and tears apart packaging material and advertising leaflets in a sort of indigestion process which relentlessly overflows and rapes the edges…That's how Bianca Tosatti starts off her text, published in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, in which Giorgio Zanchetti and the writer Claudio Di Scalzo provide further reading-keys to the viewer, to allow him/her to feel 'inside' the context of packaging-unwrapping, or in the transitory magnetic recomposing of Raffaella Formenti's works.But how did all this begin? It's Raffaella herself who tells us: "I began almost mechanically to file, sheet after sheet, useless pages of any old magazine, folding it over itself until it became a sort illegible micro-film, of which one can only guess the plot (…) The primitive gestures of dexterity search for insight in the accumulation due to an automatic repetitionHowever, these primitive gestures repeated with obsession unleash a sense of vitality and construction, which leads to the creation of totem-like constructions full of bright colours. The "monument" challenge is interesting, such as the one in the abbey of San Zeno, Pisa, where the eternal columns are coated with today's fragile waste. A comparison? A warning? It's surely not a physical matching, but a mnemonic one (thus more conscious), of radically different communication systems, which today are closer than ever. But Raffaella Formenti's challenge is another one: to bring the emotions felt before a Malevic painting on the street. Without having to clean one's shoes.

Gabriella Anedi