LAURA AMBROSI

SHADOWLAND of Tiziana Conti

A shadowland, desolate, where man has become a frail
presence, where comunication is silent or even worse,
it is reduced to a linear information.
This worrying image reveals a humanity subdued by
anxiety, by a painful denial of life, in a temporal
dimension that, as Ingeborg Bachman asserts, it is
now "postponed", it is granted, but can continually
be "recalled".
The reflection on the loss of a existential horizon
constitutes the thematic nucleus on which Laura Ambrosi
moves from the very beginning. Her acrylics on wood, her
charcoals, her red crayon drawings always turn to the main
idea of the human being's moving towards the centre of
the earth, metonomy of the enigma, of the unfathomable
abyss of the soul. The fact that the being is asexual
underlines the loss of identity, his reduction to a body
oppressed by his own burden, a closed shape, an abstract
involucre which does not reflect armony, rather it
characterizes the ontology of the emptiness.

For that reason the co-ordinates of the man-icon are
the enstrangement and the absence, they are exemplified
through figures that are exactly alike, imprisoned in
the elementary of their own structure.
Taking body from such preliminary remarks the Installagmiti,
sculptures in alveolar polycarbonated, shapes "plunged"
partly in the ground, curved, curled up on themselves,
to the fervish search of a possible placing.
Seen from above, they seem freezed puppet in an
omnivorous enviroment in which they "spend" without
beeing able to leave a durable trace.
From this imploded situation, the search subsequently
spreads over a wider semanthic sphere, in reply to the
necessity of a semanthic trial which makes concrete the
qualitative whole that pervades the reality.
The enlargement of the speech allows to surpass the
ontological closing, establishing a relationship between
man and "object". The speech is as easy as effective.
The every day in which we are plunged is populated by
a variety of banal, ordinary objects, often unnecessary
and redundant.

The artist "feels" the "forming" capacity of the object
to capture situations and she expresses it through
connections that primarely make reference to the polarity
inner-external. The "lighthanger" born and they disclose
the brightness as catalyst element that is related to the
colour and the space, able to restore the trasparent reality
to itself, materializing the tie between concept and perception.
But the "lighthanger" also assumes another meaning: in fact
it recalls the memory of a garment, opening a talk that finds
its topic in the oxymoron illusion-essence.
The look has the worry to radiograph an enigmatic complexity.
The project of the exhibition connects all these elements.
In the central space of the gallery two icons face each other:
a trasparent raincoat endowed with light buttons and a black
evening dress. Between the funereal and the liquid trasparency
it is established a dialectic relationship stretched on
paradox thread. In fact, black is ransomed by the typology
of the garments, conceived for an "official" situation,
as well as, in its turn, the perspicuity of the raincoat
struggles with the leaden humor of the rain.

On the contrary, the element of the ossessive repeat
is revealed by the oil paintings that reproduce shapes
of coathanger, vertically arranged, so as to suggest
the idea of mass-production.
The figurative sense becomes even more evident in the
installation of the hanged out washings, that confirms
the importance of a tie of contiguity between inner and
external.
The static disposition of the clothes is only apparent.
In fact, to take care, they offer an intense split of
real life, revealing their belongings to the custom,
to the inner and meaningful moments of Laura Ambrosi's life.
They are fragments of a everyday life that cease to be banal
when they "put" themselves as a lively presence or as
emblematic evdences of the memory.

In this case, the garment is not an
individual's succedaneaus, neither an involucre.It suggests
a deep reflection on the contrast between what it is ascribed
to a completely exterior fetish dimension and what on the
contrary is integrant and constitutive part of the experience.
It leads us to questions on the sclerosis that results from
the loss of individuality.
Then the work recovers and filters the life: it is an
hypothesis that contributes to emancipate a reality parallel
to that physical, materializing the fluidity of the becoming.
The reification does not exasperate the absence; rather the
object claims the man's presence as the only possibility to
struggle with the illusory intrution in which the interval
between man and object becomes a dull noise, mere information.
Laura Ambrosi's object comes into the life, as if it wanted to
rule through the metaphor of the absence, the hyperreal
simulacres.

Tiziana Conti