Stefano Arienti / Eva Marisaldi

Saturday 19th September 2020, annus horribilis, Eva Marisaldi and Stefano Arienti, two delicate champions of their generation, will hold the umpteenth show in our gallery.
Umpteenth because they have held many ─not too many, but enough to give us a precise idea of their respective work. Work that becomes more and more incisive with the passing of time, a chromatic transition from youth to a maturity that once seemed so far away, and yet is so manifest today.
Personal maturity sometimes coincides with artistic maturity, and work which used to appear difficult to understand gradually becomes more clear-cut.
I have said before that Eva’s work, together with Fabro’s, proceeds along ample avenues, where it is easy to zigzag and thus give an impression of little coherence. Contrarily, Giulio Paolini or Carl Andre insist on a distinct concept, thus guaranteeing the impression of depth.
Marisaldi’s 3000 pagine draws on the physicality (i.e. sonority) of a congress held by the Chinese Communist Party: the President reads a report, of which everybody in the audience, 3000 people, holds a copy that they read mentally together with the President for a long time. You could have heard a pin drop, the only noise being the rustling of the 3000 pages as they were turned by the 3000 delegates.
The author focuses on one detail (the classic synecdoche or figure of speech where a part is used to refer to the whole): the meaningful part, deprived of context, becomes the centre of the work which, originating from a real event, adapts it to the requirements of art and artistic abstraction.
By definition, art is necessarily useless (at least immediately; mediately, there is nothing more necessary than art).
The example created here by Marisaldi, assisted by Enrico Serotti’s technical ability, highlights or, indeed, creates a shift of meaning (that is to say a metaphor) from a bombastic event that decides the fate and the economy of a huge nation to a combination of background noises and, in the background, a rhythmic rustle, like and undertow: it is but a short step from ocean undertow to ideological drift.
Stefano Arienti, on the other hand, goes on with his relentless and non-violent interference with languages and figures, stereotypes of decorative paper, starting from ordinary things, works of art for the have-nots, laden with the stereotyped beauty of a sunset or an exotic landscape.
Arienti reworks the image by cutting, sewing, zipping, adding to it.
For the current show, he presents creased, wet, painted papers, stretched on a loom with light effects based on a difference in levels. His images stand between the beautiful and the obvious but are rescued by the often imperceptible hand of the artist who tends not to modify the image too evidently.
Arienti’s handling of images dignifies and adds sense to their everyday reality, bringing into the world of Art figures which would otherwise be destined for domestic decoration. His work is a lifebuoy thrown to that jumble of decorative department store images that populate our daily life, halfway between the trite and a craving for beauty.
Arienti, with his non-violent ways, takes this imagerie by the hand and brings it back into the world of art, from where it had just emerged.