Galvanised metal, copper, steel, but also ropes, cotton, latex gloves… The choice of materials for Barbara Grossato has no boundaries and represents the deepest reason for her research. Anomalous or traditional, cold or warm, mouldable or rigid, tactilely inviting or prickly, artificial or with an almost organic nature: the materials used by the artist intertwine in a continuous game of cross-references and encounters, generating contrasting synaesthetic sensations. This is not a purely aesthetic choice, but rather an expressive need. It is precisely to the materials, in fact, that Barbara entrusts her inner voice: they become an elective tool for the narration of her existential journey, of her private world. Each work is a diary page and the material is the ink that makes it visible. There is no solution of continuity between Barbara Grossato’s works and what she calls her ‘inner nature’. What guides her in the creative act is a natural instinct. To describe this drive, Barbara appeals to a term that is very present in ancient Greek philosophy: Physis, or the principle and cause of all things, the vital energy that generates every creature, the principle of movement and growth. I think there is no other term that can describe my work so intimately,’ says the artist, feeling deeply akin to her own creative process this vital spark, but also the search for balance in the change of which the Greek Physis is cause and effect. Guiding her hands in the creation of the work is, therefore, something profoundly instinctive. Barbara moves and creates following the thread of emotion and leaving rationality to the side as much as possible. To indulge this creative process free of conditioning and intellectualism, she has come to use only her hands as her sole working tool. The forms are moulded with her bare hands: with her fingers and nails, feeling the material on her skin, establishing a profound dialogue with it, with an attitude that I would describe as almost ritualistic, if not downright tribal. Even in the gesture of spreading colour with her fingers, excluding the medium of the brush, there is a profound and heartfelt rituality: a private rite, however, that follows exquisitely personal codes and does not allow foreign interference. There is a visceral relationship between Barbara Grossato and her works, and ample traces of this intimate relationship remain in her works. Grossato’s are biomorphically shaped creatures, never motionless, not even when they are confined in a shrine or painted on a two-dimensional surface. Their tangled, twisted and intricate structures do not seem to know stasis. They vibrate,They coil up, extend their tentacles into the surrounding space, capture our gaze with their changing presence. They challenge our optical perception, but also stimulate our sense of touch, with their simultaneously inviting and disturbing shapes in constant dynamism. And it is understandable, seeing how they take possession of the environment that welcomes them, that the artist has progressively neglected painting in favour of the three-dimensionality of sculpture: the path of the installation is undoubtedly the most appropriate to give life to this polymateric and polymorphic universe of his, which puts the natural world into dialogue with the artificial one, bending the coldness and syntheticity of industrial materials to the organicity of forms. His pictorial works, moreover, also transcend two-dimensional space. Their dense sign textures, the constant contamination of techniques, and the presence of elements applied to the painted surface have always characterised Barbara Grossato’s research. The evident (almost ostentatious) heterogeneity in the choice of materials and, in a certain sense, also in the expressive grammar, is counterbalanced by an extraordinary consistency in the creative approach, in the intentions that generate the artist’s expressive need. Let us therefore refer to that Physis, that primordial energy that all Barbara’s works seem to release or retain within themselves, in any case ready to release its force as soon as possible. In an elegant balance (because in spite of the instinctiveness with which they are created, they have their own remarkable aesthetic pleasantness), Barbara Grossato’s works bring the natural world and the artificial world into dialogue, creating an anomalous, intriguing and deeply fascinating universe. But they also bear within themselves the trace of the gesture of the artist who created them, the imprint of her state of mind at the moment of their creation. They carry within them a story: the private and intimate tale of an artist who entrusts her whole self to her work, without censorship, without deception, without filters.
Simona Bartolena
Barbara Grossato 