Roberta Gubitosi

The search of Roberta Coldel sees in the technical and pictorial testing a way to express herself and a method of investigation of her own individuality, far from the lyrical and far lagoon landscapes to beautiful and quiet corners of nature, to the evocative “fragments”. It is a long process in which the observer is almost driven to the perception of places dear to the artist to get lost in the detail of the fragment. Just in the recent series “fragments” the artist develops a unique research where the idea of completeness is abandoned to plumb the depths and dwell on the detail of a whole long gone. Fragment in fact means small detached piece of a body, of a unified whole. In this way the artist looks back on herself, on her painting, and begins to analyze it, to break it up, to fragment it. A single particular grows and expands into the field of view to get deformed and a most lose its figurative identity. The formal structure of the work is given solely by the chromatic material that is subjected to a maximum torsion and tension. In these compositions the processes of selection and simplification combine to enhance the communicative power of shapes and colors. For Roberta Coldel fragmenting it’s figurative world also means focusing on the enhancement of the creative potential of the painting. This leads to a reconsideration of media and technical processes involved to acquire a more emotional and instinctive doing. The materials are investigated for their optical characteristics and physical properties, which make it possible for the colors to expand, thicken, pour, reject between them. The artist often extends several overlapping layers of paint, then she scrapes and drags them with different tools, leaving the underlying colors shine through and shaping the material. The painting surface is then etched, engraved, marked almost like a sheet of metal. “wrapped”, “foam”, “planning”, “suspended”, “fleeting” are some titles that distinguish the works of the series fragments, in which the forms are not born by addition of color, but by subtraction due to the quick gesture of the artist. In this way the lagoon, the flowers, the trees of her landscapes are evoked in fragments, in the form of lyrical quotes. Each fragment, in its extreme formal synthesis, represents the lyrical pinnacle in which the artist collects and concentrates all her expressive energy. This modus operandi suggests a new approach to the reality that starts from the perception of detail. In this sense one can speak of a “poetics of the fragment” so in a particular we recognize the universal, the harmony of reality, the proximity, by analogy to everything surrounding the artist.