artist in officina
Artist Residency
Agata Stępień
Memoria Absentia, August 2024
The exhibition is the culmination of the creative process of "Memoria Absentia" and its accompanying happening. By experimenting with modern conservation solvents, Agata Stepien shows that the creative process can exist through subtraction, not just addition and accumulation. The initial image is X-rayed by a conservation technician, and becomes a sketch for subsequent works. This is an archaeological exploration through abrasion, scraping, and burning with chemicals.
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These are not simply completed paintings, but evolving works with coexisting, generative, and constructive elements. The idea for this project was born a few months ago when the artist's friend, a conservator at Auschwitz, talked about the renovation of a chapel. During several months of floor exploration, she made surprising discoveries. Her words evoked in the artist's imagination images of tunnels, corridors, and the tension associated with a possible discovery. As a child, Agata dreamed of becoming an archaeologist.
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The paintings are shots from the subconscious, an approach to beauty, tragedy, or brilliance. A finished and completed work of art is more than just the sum of its parts. It is also a visual force that unleashes destruction, exaggeration, and love for the extreme. As human beings, we are dominated by passions, just as we were five or three thousand years ago. Therefore, art must necessarily confront humanity. This simple truth implies that art, besides existing, can and should engage in dialogue with the viewer.
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The process of contemporary art is based on impulses from reality, which concern the human condition, and constitutes a mixture of intuition and instinct. Contemporary art allows us to reach deep problems and tensions, as long as we are prepared to face them. Feelings, even if sometimes uncomfortable, stimulate.
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Agata’s aim is to reveal everything that is uncertain, hidden, doubtful, and marginal regarding the inspiration of the creative process. Demonstrating that no one is exempt from imperfection and insecurity. Through art she expresses her feelings and defines the creative process as an act of assimilating emotions and engaging the viewer personally. Art liberates both the visual sphere and the concepts of art, beauty, and aesthetics.
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Creating a painting can require several sessions, repeated every few months, for up to two years. Repainted over and over again, scraped, soaked in resin, painted with the earth extracted from under ancestral houses, these works become the silent companions of the artist…. They tell the story of women, and every feminine narrative, once told, becomes a success in its own right.
Sponsored by
Margareth Dorigatti - Epistolarium - Attesa , June 2024
ARTISTINOFFICINA is pleased to present the project “Epistolarium - Attesa” by the artist Margareth Dorigatti. This is the “opening” to a series of initiatives, linked to the work of other artists invited to develop their own research projects while based temporarily at the Atelier-Officina. It is intended that this initial event will lead the way for them too to exhibit their work in Montefollonico at the end of their residence in the Atelier-Officina.
In a time in which the rule of "everything now" applies and patience has no place in the daily frenzy of contemporary society, Margareth Dorigatti invites us to reflect on waiting and the many facets of the human soul that it affects. Handwritten correspondence, the leitmotif of the works on display, began to spread in the first half of the thirteenth century, coinciding with the spread of vernacular language and the start of the production of paper in Italy, a material which was far cheaper than parchment. The advent of the digital age has swept away age-old habits in just a quarter of a century.
Not only is the artist therefore focusing our attention on a tradition which has virtually disappeared, but she makes it an autobiographical, intimate and personal story. Mystery and curiosity find space in her canvases. The content of the letters, sometimes partially revealed, other times only put in context by the time and place in which they existed, creates an invisible bond with the observer. The involvement then becomes emotional, resurrecting feelings from a time now lost, but alive in the emotional memories that influence the present of each of us.
“(…) You’re an acute, insightful and occasionally unsparing analyst of your - and our - feelings, dear Margareth. And this way of delving deep into expression and existence is what makes your “Epistolarium” so fascinating: the chromatic grafts, mixed techniques, double surfaces and your astounding technical armoury all become part of the picture with the spontaneous emotional strength of a caress, intimating harmony among apparent dissonance. Far from any form of intellectual dalliance, these works speak for the magnetic virtue of achieving poetry in pictorial form. (…)”
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Duccio Trombadori (poet, journalist, art critic and teacher of Aesthetics at the Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza) from the catalogue for the exhibition held at the Galleria MAJA Arte Contemporanea in Rome.
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con il patrocinio di
Comune
Torrita Di Siena