Marta Ravasi at Acappella

To write about Marta Ravasi’s work, we must take into consideration that writing is also an aesthetic tool of expression. This must be considered because accompanying an exhibition of Marta with a text that speaks of the images that the public eye sees composed on her canvases, one runs the risk of disturbing the pictorial balance of the paintings. Having written this, I already realize that I have invented an expression that I’m not sure is right to use in the texts of the exhibitions. By pictorial balance however, I don’t mean the way in which oil paint with a higher fat percentage fits perfectly with portions of the picture where the color is thinner. Although this aspect is interesting, I promised myself not to dwell too much on the technical aspects of our painting. In this case and as usually happens, I think it is important to know just a couple of technical information about painting: in addition to what I have already written, someone might find it interesting that Marta buys tubes of Rembrandt oil paints wherever, I think in the most comfortable fine arts shop to reach from her studio, and she prints and frames her canvases by herself. In this way, I hope that during the inauguration of her exhibition at Acappella in Naples, whoever read this text won’t bother her by trying to find out what kind of brushes Marta uses, since she doesn’t give a damn about this.

A more satisfying way of constructing in words the impression that Marta’s paintings leave on me is to have an approach that she used to write herself the text of her exhibition at the Fanta gallery in Milan, a sort of text/poetry from the content that barely touches the elements and objects that help the artist to paint. Then as now, those elements are subjects of photographs that Marta finds online, prints them and accumulates them in a box that she keeps in her studio and which with a few drops of colour, with the trace left by the dirty hand or more generally with the slight carelessness in handling them, maybe they wrinkle a little and become beautiful. You see, we painters like these minimal things because we know that in a certain sense, we are forced to settle for considering, exploring and developing only very few of the infinite aspects of painting at a time. With a text/poem I would not be forced to say superficially that Martha’s are still-lifes that are more evanescent and delicate than the classic ones, and that by observing those objects we are never able to have a “direct” perception of them because the human gaze implies a precise perspective, and therefore, what we call vision is always a dimension of blurring, the restitution of a body that is partly real and partly imagined. In my opinion, all of Marta’s paintings are arranged alongside her emotions and thus proceed together. In the same way, I would like to organize the words I have written so far in a space so as to create other images, in a sort of visual text, in a small work to be placed next to Marta’s paintings. This could be a satisfying way to say a little more about her work.

– Alessandro Carano