Roberta Coni. The matter of the gaze

curated by Lorenzo Canova

The exhibition Roberta Coni. The Matter of the Gaze, set up in the Milan branch of Galleria Russo, follows the monographic exhibition already presented at the Scuderie Aldobrandini for Art in Frascati. Curated by Lorenzo Canova, the exhibition brings together an important nucleus of paintings made during the course of 2009. Roberta Coni’s work is placed in a particular position born from a long research directed toward the profound and the interior, placed in a psychological dimension that for years bases with intensity her painting, in a path where the stylistic choices have followed the evolution of his personal iconic language. The artist therefore moves with a strong and entirely entirely contemporary attention to the solutions offered by digital technologies without neglecting the quality of the brushstroke that over time has been enriched with new vibrations of the pictorial fabric where the wrinkles and folds of the epidermis, the lights on an earring or the reflections of the iris are painted with the liquid and palpitating drafting of a color that manages to be at the same time full-bodied and light. In the desire to create then a subtle sense of uncertainty, the artist often chooses to paint his large works through the composition of several joined canvases that with their slight offset put crisis the purely photographic presence of the image and its simplistic interpretation in key of mere technical virtuosity. The artist’s pictorial matter thus becomes the material existential of the gaze and the psyche that binds Coni to the people portrayed and to the viewer
through a tactile bridge made of perceptions and fragments of time, a psychic and
sensory animated and awakened by the breath of life concealed in the dynamic asperities evoked by a painting that approaches the possible meaning of the world by reworking a formless matter conceived, shaped and reconstructed through the artist’s hands and thought.