Pictoribus atque poetis
quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas.
Quinto Orazio Flacco, Epistula ad Pisones (Ars
Poetica)
Demiurgic nature is both human and divine. In the Platonic and Neo-Platonic meaning of the term. The demiurge does not generate from nothing, but rather orders, moulds and infuses life into already existing matter, allowing it an essential transcendence from its brute consistency to a more worthy and complete one. How well this description fits the nature of the woman and the artist is self-evident. Outside the philosophical meaning, but in full consonance with a more Jungian mythical dimension, the ‘creative’ energy of the artist and the woman is that which enables the transformation of inert but potentially infinite objects into something small but endowed with meaning. It is in this light that the creative process that allows Barbara Grossato – woman and artist – to produce (producere: to bring forth, to form) her works from elementary signs that, almost endowed with a vitality of their own, aggregate, split, duplicate themselves as organic matter. As in an alchemic photosynthesis, the inorganic becomes organic, alive, eloquent and sincere. As Arturo Schwarz would have liked: a type of alchemic art. Like life. This happens regardless of the medium she employs: her paintings, sculptures and installations firmly take up their space and occupy it, interacting fruitfully with the environment, whatever it may be. The works thus enter into dialogue with the space and dialectically confront it, with the absolute lightness of phyto-morphic elements and the strong solidity of geo-metric balances. What is at issue here is not the Eleatic essence of things, but their becoming nature, perhaps difficult to investigate, obscure who knows, but more intuitive, natural perhaps. Grossato’s works place themselves problematically in pre-constituted spaces and integrate significantly into them; otherwise it is the artist herself who leads the communicative game, creating accurate site-specific installations of great energy. The modular, almost cellular nature of her works seems to resonate harmoniously with its surroundings, like a secular mandala or a Michael Nyman composition. It does not have the conceptual rigidity one might expect, but vibrates as vital as drops in a pine forest, mutating and transmuting the essence of things: metal heats up and becomes vegetable, biological. It grows, it decays, it transforms. When he forgets painting, Grossato manipulates, handles small parts and materials usually used by workers and craftsmen: washers, metal wires, papers that escape mechanics to access metaphysics. And as in the 17th century, beauty becomes conceptual, wit becomes aesthetically ordered. Like phonemes of a Saussurian act of words, the elements employed – material and conceptual – find meaning here and now, transforming content with intention. Aggregation produces sense. a new sense, that of the work in contemporary art: decontextualising. It is an exercise in memory and emotional projection, a metaphor for current times, society and its contradictions. The hands are the true instrument, magnificently tuned, of making art. in any chosen form, without the mediation of too many means to interfere. The artist’s work proceeds by synthesis, the same that she claims between art and life, mindful and aware of what has been established by those who have gone before her. Colours are elements like forms that must be elevated to synthesis. Everything is defined, nothing appears rough, defying accumulation tamed by order, shunning roughness through balance. It is an ordered but not obvious embroidery. Everything changes in the artist’s hands, as in the humble recesses of a candid and all but innocent jungle, but with a constant spiritual tension guiding the material. It is not just scenography, it is inescapable spatialism. There it is, the synolus of form and matter that reconciles the irreconcilable conflict of human nature, between the beast and the god! Easy with the philosophy! Here we are in full emotional territory: the cold appearance of the concept gives way to the warm expansion of the instinct that everything guide, life as opera, from the depths. That life and art are a single difficult journey. And Barbara Grossato has understood this perfectly and simply teaches it to us Parma, in the middle of carnival before it all ends, 2025
Mauro Carrera
Barbara Grossato 