Introduction

by Francesco Penta (critic and director)

 

The works collected in this first antology  tell us  the tale of a meeting: Arianna Cox and the Art of painting. During all the steps of her experience, the artist focuses on the constant will to look for technical apprenticeship of an Art based on the possibility of an aesthetic construction.

The result is a steady in the making painting, in which the figurative element of the first works gives space to a reflexion on the dimension of being where there is no intention of understanding its truths but limits itself on the possibility of narrating human relations. Also, there exists an expositive circularity that is only perceived by looking at the works as a whole.

At a first glance they appear as the unfixed cards of a puzzle, the meaning seems to extenuate in the simply represented object reality but actually this is part of a solid narrative implant in which painting becomes a poetic meeting: the two cheering glasses let us imagine the woven lives of the two sippers, the champagne bottle marks the propitious moment of a celebration.

So the canvas of the three horses becomes the symbol of the inner part of ourselves that pushes through and affirms itself in complete freedom.

At this point, here comes a closed door. By entering it, a more aware way of painting immediately catches the eye, more complex in its intentions and the pictorial trait has acquired mastery and precision leaving the choice of unaltered metal colours conferring  a satin, soft  effect to the images – sensitive to the light reflecting it. We're  almost always surrounded by people with no countenance, with non identitary traits  - not allowing any categorization but stealing the looking and opening it to imagination. We can catch a glimpse of parts of us, stories, relations, separations, friendships, enemies, lovers, passions of every kind and every age in that characters with no social role. We can formulate hypotheses, develop intuitions, let them mix up into fancies and never solving them into an absolute truth. We're in front of a Pirandellian “ Right you are (if you think so)” where every thought becomes a doubt so it is also the possibility of the contrary. Where  the way is neither unique nor univocal, where there is no solitude in facing the adventure of life because there's almost a possibility of being in two.

There come the sense of the feminine Trilogy which represents the adult woman which becomes a child in the double relationship with herself and her dreams. The drawings, at last: exercises, notes, ended rough drafts. They are the expression of all the research on representing  the human body and painting from life: the composition recalls the Morandi style for the choices and the combination of the represented shapes.

The collocation of these works gives us the sensation of being in the yard where the painter's inspirations take shape and where the first essential traits of the more organic work presented , are finally inprinted.