Chioccarelli
VITA
In the heart of Prati, in Rome, last Thursday ended her exhibition "VITA", the artist Elena Chioccarelli Denis, at the gallery Micro Visual Arts.
An exhibition with a poetic and evocative character retraces the personal epic of Giulia Patrizi Carrega, the artist's grandmother, and opens the links of the great history to let out a glimmer of a personal history that speaks to us all.
On behalf of the Italian state, the woman made a long journey and landed on the African coast to reach Ethiopia, then under the control of the Italian government.
The series of polymaterial works produced and assembled are the visual projections of a journey that recounts the painful vicissitudes testified by a diary by the painter's grandmother, rediscovered by chance a few years ago.
The horrors of segregation and captivity mingle with reminiscences of a rarefied world, marked with sometimes brilliant colors, melancholically enveloped in a burnt whiteness. "VITA" is an exhibition which makes the essence of the meaning of the experience flow with delicate decoratism. The journey made by Giulia Patrizi Carrega in Ethiopia becomes an almost spiritual journey which welcomes the foreigner and allows an increase as intimate as it is painful.
The drama of life crushed between the bite of hunger and the fear of death is seen in the eyes of a woman with a veiled head. White eyes, black as burnt wood stand out against a candid sclera, almost frightened and surprised by the presence of the spectator, open on the childish face of a woman, perhaps become such too soon.
Elena Chioccarelli Denis' poetics develop by following the strong link that linked the artist's existence to that of her grandmother.
The fraction of life they shared made possible the intertwining of two souls which today pushes to satisfy the requirement to give substance to a story. The series of works highlights a little-told historical paranthesis. Colonialism experienced by Giulia Patrizi Carrega takes shape through an indirect memory: the artist has never personally visited Ethiopia.
The mythisation of this split world, however, projects onto the surfaces manipulated by Elena Chioccarelli Denis a reality shrouded in a fascinating mist. The realization of an exhibition like the one that took place in the Micro gallery has the power to get caught up in the history of others. You are accompanied out of the room with the feeling that you have left something in the back of your pockets. An intangible object that we did not have at the start of the journey has now instilled like an idea in our mind and does not leave us easily.
Reflecting on this feeling takes us through an imaginary portal that is drawn in liquid and light tints by an artist whose style is as rich as it is hardly framed in a single category.
The varied nature of the techniques employed by Chioccarelli testifies to his long series of experiences which have marked his career spanning several decades. The activity of restoration and the engagement in the craft industry are stages which have shaped the cultural background of the artist: indeed, the painter knew how to give shape today to a personal language, distinguishable in a current artistic panorama. always more productive but tending to a gray homologation