"I AM ON FIRE" Painting

Maria Cristina Carmina was born in Genoa on the 12th of September 1956 and thanks to her mother's praise, she embarked in a long artistic career. A famous statement says that “in nature, light creates colour, in paint, colour creates light”. According to Andre’ Derain, French “fauve” painter of the early ‘900, “the substance of painting is light”. The truthfulness of such statements find an obvious and unequivocable confirmation in Maria Cristina Carmina’s paintings, in which light is the absolute protagonist: light is not only “substance” but it is also the “subject”, and most of all light is the main actor in the representation, which is not a narration but it is splendour and evocation. Light, in Maria Cristina’s paintings , is not faint or suffused but it is an explosion, it is blinding, it is a creative big-bang which progressively gives life to shapes and images. Two aphorisms come to mind by observing her paintings. The first is by the great writer Charles Dickens and it states “The Sun himself is weak when he first rises, and gathers strength and courage as the day gets on”. The second aphorism, of which I can’t recall the author’s name, is in its essence particularly fitting for Carmina’s work: “The power to light up and be enlightened”. MR ANGELO VALCARENGHI, “IL CROCICCHIO” Art Gallery in Campomorone, Italy