Traces and presences by Tonino Ticchiarelli

The crisis generated by the opposition between inner dimension and social reality, by the contrast between "nature" and "culture", elements of the conscience, is a permanent aspect of the human condition revealed by the creative work of Marisa Marconi. By expressing feelings and personal visions, she distills essential images, messages of urgent inner strength impregnated with passion and sentiment. From the binomial "essence-existence" comes the pathos, the substance of her tactile vision. Through a direct relationship with the body and the use of airbrush she creates the nude, subject of monochrome paintings full of signs of time and wear: not just a depersonalized or academic nude but an interior nudity with anxieties, fears and desires. She creates shrouds, human images impregnated with breath and sweat, which give sensual and spiritual emotions. You can get lost in the folds, lost in thought. In Shroud no. 6, the primordial trace of the hand and the trace of the body, a living presence, are linked by a fragile thread, the sense of a time which is both mythical and historical. The restlessness, the setback which are reflected by the pictorial works reappear in the sculptured faces and in the modelled bodies: sexless, timeless and ageless images. The artist, if on the one hand is spiritually connected to the sculpture of the German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz and of the French Germaine Richier, on the other hand makes the Italian sculptural tradition her own: from Donatello to the work of Arturo Martini and Marino Marini. In the portraits in stone and wood, works of greater mimesis, the signs of the alienation, protagonist of the latest works, are already evident. When shaping plaster, a friable material, Marisa Marconi seems to accentuate the fragility of "real life" and creates symbols and products of an elusive and precarious reality. These are works with essential volumes that evoke the drama of Pompeian casts and denounce a dissociated and deforming reality, torn apart and agonizing.