Transition as a search for balance – ” Beatrice Tosi’s painting “
A first clear visual fact is that this kind of painting doesn’t allow any doubts about the sympathy and total involvement of the artist in the image contruction project. Indeed it’s a matter of participating strictly connected to a knowledge and meditating process on historical forms of art and on formal and cultural recognizable elements.
It is surely a painting pregnant with evocative power and subtle, heterogeneous roots. We do recognize the bright and rich color of some post-pop, the psychedelic fractal stroke, the tough drawings of surrealism, the expressionism, the clear figuration together with the impressive fluidity of colour.
All these solutions and formal choices though well known and metabolized during the artist’s education, are pretty complex to handle because they don’t allow easy mediations as they belong to compositional styles historically in contrast.
The artist’s desire is also to study the transition within the elaborate connection existing in different forms of pictorial tradition. The tense mental planning of her gesture tries constantly to communicate with her noticeable formative process producing her chromatic sign solutions in the very action of painting.
Delineation and emotion attempt the dialogue, drawing and abstraction look for their contact points : the expansion of the artist’s abstract background and the effect almost decorative of its tonal clarity appear alternatively as assumptions and/or results originated in the definition of the central expressive idea.
Furthermore her purpose, holding an important psycological aspect, seeks to dilute or more precisely to melt something strong and sharp, even tough, present in the central image located inside a chromatic and fluid magma belonging to a most complete organic structure. This formal reading allows us to outline a very interesting interpretation of Tosi’s work as it gives us confirmation of the sincere and intelligent participation to her “searching” along the artistic route.
The weaving between drawn form and abstract pictorial tissue reveals her wish to melt and blur together oneiric and organic, mind and body, symbolism and physicality. The painting’s general fabric clearly calls to mind “biological” structures and aims to occupy the whole space interlacing and connecting to a more definite central image having strong visionary and symbolic features. This central image seems to emerge from the deep folding of its very fabric trying to force its presence but remaining confused and interwoven at the same time.
These aspects make me think to a “memoirs” painting of “reminiscence” but at the same time they try to convey a concurrence of conditions belonging to the present time and to the “person’s reality” seen in his/her mind and body’s entirety.
Within an imaginary and surreal environment pervaded by organic and neuronic aspects, the central figure/figures always refer to physical reality and to feelings related to corporeity.
Giving Tosi’s work a metaphorical reading I realize that certain ideas are deeply engraved, dragged and present in the “body” and these ideas are not only mental products but rather “experiences” willing to be represented in a visible shape.
The strong presence of corporeity, organic physicality and of what is alive inside ourselves just under our skin, make us think that the artist’s introspective exploration is aimed to show us an hypothetical point where consciousness and biology come in contact with each other; a transition’s limit point where physicality and memory, impression and perception reveal themselves remaining suspended in the very moment of pouring into one another.
Within the artist’s formal and content choices it appears to take shape a “transitoriness” concept which should be peculiar of the arts namely being able to create works permitting a transition from aesthetic perception to conceptualism in such a way that the experience of vision will build “thought” or reflection starting from the aesthetic datum. What appears to be effective in Tosi’s works is the lack of intention to symbolize facts, they surely strive for keeping visible the constant and precarious balance between vision and thought, experience and idea, body and soul.
Antonio Zimarino