How many faces can paper take on, or, vice-versa, how many abstractions can it materialize? Carioca artist Flaminia Mantegazza does not preclude either of these two roads and, armed with newsprint or pages of magazines, creates her own personal worlds. Small pieces of motley-colored sheets come together to compose interior or dreamlike states through contrasts of colors and volumes.
Starting with the use of this support, her canvasses become a veritable material setting: applied and shaped, the tiny pieces emerge from the surface, loosening the boundaries between two-dimensional image and plastic image, suspended between painting and sculpture. “Curious unions of fragments,” writes art critic Maurizio Vanni, “contaminated elements, harmonic dissonances, optical oxymorons, tiles of an eternally developing universal mosaic: these are the sensations that anyone trying to penetrate her work experience”.
Through this particular technique, Flaminia Mantegazza embarks on a quest for the essence of that truth that cannot appear to the naked eye and, plumbing the depths of the universe of abstraction, succeeds in making her dreams tangible. “The comparison with dreams,” explains Vanni, “corresponds to the lucid freedom of expression of a person who – through a creativity not necessarily controlled – wishes to break the molds, to go beyond conventions, intercepting the essence of an image or the extreme synthesis of a form.” An absolute freedom that brings her in direct contact with the most instinctive, less investigated part of herself, with that deeper part of the subconscious in order to reveal its most intimate secret. “The Brazilian artist’s paper dreams,” concludes Vanni, “are truly unexpected and unanticipated visual notes that acquire consistency first in the mind and then in the hands of a person who has decided to follow up even her daytime dreams, her conscious visions that – albeit not contemplated by Freud – tell much about the artist and about the emotions that preside over her artistic work”.
Michela Cicchinè