ROBERTA SERENARI - Italy

CONTACT: info@robertaserenari.com

PERSONAL WEBSITE www.robertaserenari.com.

The invitation

The target

oil on canvas cm 140 x 140

oil on canvas cm 100 x 130

Dear Dad

The Tamer

oil on canvas cm 140 x 140

oil on canvas cm 150 x 170

The eternal lie

Listening to the spell

oil on canvas cm 120 x 130

Her Biography

born in Bologna, she lives and works in Sasso Marconi (BO)
She is self-taught.
Her natural childhood gift for drawing has grown over the years through in-depth study of oil painting and Art History, with her only teacher being an attentive, passionate eye for past and contemporary works seen in museums and galleries around the world.
Her painting is meant to lead to an intimate reflection, where a female presence prevails, endowed with a mysterious fascination. The protagonists are often very beautiful little girls with austere, icy gazes, suspended between metaphysical settings and symbolic references that lead us in search of the surprising mystery of “passage”, fleeting time, the sense of waiting and the feared change.
The titles of the solo exhibitions that followed over the years reflect this favorite theme. They are: “In Search of Alice”, “Breakfast”, “Dear Dad”, “I Killed Snow White”, “Intimate Theatre”, “In the Many Rooms”, “Rosa-Rosae”, “Ma-Donne”, “Enchantment and Spell”, etc…

There have been numerous group and solo exhibitions from 1982 to today, including in the 2000s at Galleria Ariete and Galleria Forni in Bologna, at Leudo in Genoa and at Davico in Turin. These were followed by shows in institutional venues such as Rocca Paolina in Perugia, Palazzo dei Pio in Carpi, the Pirelli Skyscraper in Milan, Palazzo Albertini in Forlì, Palazzo Durini in Milan, Castello Orsini in Soriano Cimino (VT), Palazzo Bottini in Lucca, the S. Leo Fortress in Rimini, Palazzo Zanca in Messina, Palazzo Valmarana Braga in Vicenza, the Diocesan Museum of Catania, the monumental complex of S. Leucio Caserta, the Bargellini Museum in Pieve di Cento Ferrara, the Fortezza Vecchia in Livorno, etc
In 2011 she was invited by Vittorio Sgarbi to take part in the 54th Venice Biennale for the Italy Pavilion, Emilia Romagna section, at Palazzo Pigorini in Parma with the work “Luna Park”.
Her works are held in private and public collections such as the Cà La Ghironda Museum (BO), the Logudoro Museum (SS), the Picture Gallery of the Arcispedale Sant’Anna in Ferrara, the collection of the Hotel Albornoz in Spoleto and the Permanent Collection of Costa Crociere on the ships Costa Deliziosa and Costa Fascinosa.

They have written about her painting

	….the context in which Serenari works and creates can be interpreted as the objective concretization of an intimate and romantic impulse, and yet the unmistakable mark of an ideality connected to plastic values intrinsic to figuration remains admirable, and lies well beyond the mere desire to set up a recognizable, representative vision. In this meditated painting, intense narrative backgrounds open up, where a female presence prevails, endowed with a mysterious fascination. Each composition is ordered in an anti-rhetorical relationship with reality, which is re-proposed in a deliberately static key, as if produced by a visual appropriation defined in a frozen temporality. Mistress of a pictorial stroke of unquestionable quality, she loves to analyze in full light the most disparate forms of a concrete yet incongruous world, populated by emanations of the dreams and memories of the adolescent female character who inhabits it, and who has by now learned to master reality. The Alice who lives in these paintings is perhaps still that of Lewis Carroll, since from the memory of her distant childhood journey there remains the taste for reinterpreting space in imaginative perspectives of suspended and even metaphysical atmospheres. But it is also clear that this is an Alice who has now grown up, well able to distinguish and choose the right side of the mirror. Vittorio Sgarbi (taken from a longer text) In the wonderland that Roberta Serenari creates, with a command of color and volumes that never separates from technique, feeling or passion, the intriguing mystery of dreamlike atmospheres stirs within cold, hibernating breezes able to marble the unaware little girls dressed in that perfectly draped, soft red velvet, tangible, as if alive between our fingers. Perfect faces exude a sharp emotional tension, express a communicative violence, transmitting it forcefully without disappointing the expectations of the observer. The artist shifts the observer into the represented character, using a romantic calm and a dynamism concealed through slow-motion actions, acting out a formal rigor, almost theatrical, whose masks veil suspended or hidden gazes, leaving the viewer hanging, poised in a reality undecided between imagination and dream. Multidirectional is the architecture: it confuses, spreading and gathering, it makes the scene explode as it opens like on a new, futuristic stage. These are the secret labyrinths of Roberta Serenari’s art, a new art steeped in mysticism and magic, fascinating, dazzling, promising the expression of what in art we would like to see more often: suggestive beauty and rigorous techniques. The woman, in her works, whether child or nymph, becomes the spokesperson for hidden meanings able to open a tale on unsettling themes, which at times compromise innocence and candor within the female, childlike universe. Roberta Serenari defeats all the darkest shadows using the best weapon that can be wielded through art: Beauty. It is in fact through this continuous search that the artist manages to legitimize the deepening of the emotional sphere, as indeed emerges from what she herself says: “In my ‘Magical Realism’, through recurring symbolisms and wordplay, I would like to give my figures the power to play a role with the viewer … The little girls I portray are not anecdotal, in their silence and stillness they do not tell, but ask… They have an aware and perhaps unsettling air because they are dressed in an enormous power: everything still has to happen… They come from a place that crosses time, leaving on the canvas their small magic.” Carla Primiceri Roberta Serenari approached painting as a self-taught artist, spending hours in museums and then alone, in the studio, working in oil on canvas. Over the years she has arrived at the very clean technique that now distinguishes her work. The subjects move in metaphysical sets crowded with objects laden with mysterious meanings, from the blindfolded doll abandoned in a box to the egg with a fifteenth-century suggestion. Even the colors, from the blood red of the little dresses to the white declined in draperies sharp as blades, appear imbued with symbolic values, while the checkerboards and recurring stripes suggest esoteric symbolisms. The protagonists are little girls, always caught in that ineffable instant that separates childhood from adolescence. Haughty, prisoners of their crystalline perfection, they look at the viewer, challenging them to penetrate their secret….. Alessandra Radaelli ….mute and motionless presences like icons, these are the little girls painted by Roberta Serenari, who for years has refined this style of hers, so precious and rich in technical virtuosity, aimed at presenting an epiphanic child universe, an iconography of adolescence that is unsettling and rich in symbols, which seems to contain the sense of the mystery of life. Metaphysical and surreal little girls, hieratic like profane idols, while the objects surrounding them, in precarious balance, reflect a blocked dynamism, a flash, an image torn from a blink of an eye. To the breakfast cups, Serenari’s superb glazing technique brings close a unique form such as the egg, a closed and perfect microcosm that lives on autonomous solicitations, on enclosed and gathered hopes, on geometric and artistic allusions (Piero della Francesca’s egg). These austere little girls, with the red ribbon in their hair and the enigmatic expression, are immersed in the virginal age of games, they contain within themselves the feminine side and the masculine one, represented by the ties that appear with studied nonchalance among the objective references: paper dolls, the ball, the little carousel, the puppets, the candies, the female mannequin, idea of a body to come: a playroom that looks to the dream of life, to the unconscious project, to innocence still intact, visions of a modern and ancient fairy tale at the same time… Silvia Arfelli Roberta Serenari’s painting, so refined and mimetic, where a kind of magical realism mixes with some surrealist option, has always posed me some problem, not only aesthetic, which I do not hesitate to define as crucial. When Sigmund Freud wrote his essay on Jensen’s Gradiva, he entrusted literature—and we can well say art in general—with a new function: no longer only that of showing the dialectic of History, as Marxist thought wanted, or of making beauty concrete, as the devotees of art for art’s sake claimed, but of turning into a scientific probe, a metaphorical bathyscaphe to explore the abysses of the unconscious. The work of art, in plain words, became a virtual test to go and meet those mythical beings—the definition is Freud’s last—that are instincts. Serenari’s little girls, so ambiguous and stunned, so mendacious and falsely innocent, are in line with Freud’s lesson, with his polymorphous monster child, the savage bad one of the civilized adult, and thus diverge from that rediscovery of childhood as an Edenic place that the painters of the century just past—think of Paul Klee—had fantasized. Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century, two points of view clash: on the one hand childhood as an incubator of perversions, and on the other as the realm of a golden age of innocence and creativity; and while Freud’s Oedipus kills the father, Felix, Klee’s son, brings the father into his playroom to point out his own childish drawings as an example. Serenari’s little girls are placed by the painter at a crossroads, between having seen the primal scene, the famous look through the keyhole into the parents’ bedroom, and being an accomplice to the adult’s seduction, placing their little hands on the man’s neck with the candies. Serenari’s painting is rich in implications that go, so to speak, beyond the works themselves, making it seem superfluous to me to write and praise her stylistic mastery and her extraordinary ability, as a great physiognomist between Lavater and Darwin, to render in faces, as in a hallucinated transparency, emotions, or, if preferred, the soul. Observing her paintings, it matters little to ask whether such a representation so faithful to reality is modern, post-modern, or in any case futuristic: what counts is a feeling of deep involvement and empathy. Her little girls are concrete, living, they have a violent vocation to become part of our world: they are among us, they are us. GIORGIO CELLI Exhibition “Dear Dad” Cà la Ghironda Museum Zola Predosa 2006

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