Totem - TA1 Painting

Luigia d'Alfonso and Ada Perla, after following individual paths, decided in 2002 to share a studio, and their daily relationship stimulated them to start a new adventure together. The dialogue, fertile ground of their work, has shaped a conceptual construction whose origin is in the surname that binds them, Perla. The research on the pearl has connected their respective aesthetic and existential experiences. The image has slowly changed from an exogenous element to an inner suggestion that has allowed the authors to reach a common language: the Sabìr, chosen in allusion to the ancient, free and unwritten language of brokerage once spoken in the Mediterranean harbors. The creative process of the artistic duo dap does not include preparatory sketches but individual thematic explorations that come together in their four-hand work. The experimentation of different pictorial techniques has been essential to achieve the expressive harmony between the artists and create a correspondence between concept and language. The pictorial stratification on dismissed fabrics that still store the time thickness of their past, starts from a careful choice of colors. The unique "mixed" technique that the artists have developed is fundamental in the phase of color layering because the absorption is immediate and this implies also the acceptance of every single unintentional brush stroke that the fabric takes over as if it had its own soul. The long and delicate assemblage is carried out with intangible gauzes, to complete the void left by the "missing words". If Sabír are the plots of the main speech, the fragments of the fabrics left over are words suspended. These tatters of painted fabrics deliberately left aside, poetically and rhythmically recomposed, are combined with a playful spirit in the Ciaccerata... chattering in the streets, confidences on the doorstep, the market shouts, whispers, mutterings...