critica

ARCHAEOGRAPHIES

(on Raffaella Vaccari’s painting)

The most recent work by Raffaella Vaccari definitely belongs to the archaeographic universe: her golden unique marks seem, in fact, to be given back to our eye by a ceaseless digging which has dug them up from the bowels of the earth. 

Let us, thus, examine what are the founding and primary elements of these works: the background and the mark. We can state, therefore, without fear of contradiction, that all these works are the outcome of a dialectic between background and mark: an earthy; magmatic background, where the eye of the artist often lingers, just to observe what is happening to the flowing and moving matter; and a mark which deliberately search its own spatiality; its own meaning; its own raison d’etre amidst the events, telluric in terms of colors and matter, of the background. 

We are faced with a language evolving simultaneously in two directions, which may even seem opposite and irreconcilable, but which, instead, are harmonic and dialectical: the grammar of the purest materic Informalism, where the painting seems to be shaping itself – at first thrown onto the canvas, to be, later on, controlled just as far as the matter itself allows it  -; and then, the act, conceptually aware to be applying onto that, almost entropic happening, some limpid, clear, decisive and, I would dare say, guiding marks. 

They are not marks simply applied on the background; as if they were just slapped on it, but marks capable of producing a deep relationship with the background, and thus, of creating an archetypal or, indeed, an archaeographic whole. 

To a closer look, we are not interested in knowing if these backgrounds have been created by a simple fossil randomness or, else, as the result of the most varied weather conditions; but the marks, well, those have certainly been left by a human hand; by the decision, so fully and painfully human, to leave a trace of its own fleeting passage, as if to say: ‘I am here’, or ‘I was here’, or else ‘this is to testify that I have been here too’. 

These marks; these traces; these fragments of words and things, whose entirety has been devoured by time, clearly and naturally belong to the most primary testamentary volition. 

It is as if archaeologists, in their tireless digging; in their looking for long-lost civilizations, whose existence they are certain of, suddenly came across a series of boards and panels, diverse and fragmented;  each one implying a whole impossible to be reassembled. And yet, they would keep on searching, as if facing a puzzle, for the chance to rebuild that single word which would possibly lead to the meaning of all the others;  to simply understand, at the end of it all, that those remains find their reason only within themselves, and there is no more whole, granted there was ever one. And so, these archaeographies, if we simply pauseand listen to their fine sound, create a dense web of echoes and resonances, like shreds of a whole completely lost. 

Maybe lost forever because forever lost.   

Enrico Lombardi – Summer 2018

Translated by Angela Lombardi