The Svenja Deininger. Two Thoughts exhibition at the Maramotti Collection in Reggio Emilia, which was inaugurated just before the national lockdown caused by the Covid-19 emergency, has not yet received all the attention it deserved for these reasons of force majeure. We have virtually visited it, through official images and videos, confident that there will be the possibility in a few weeks to get closer to the pictorial and material thought of the Austrian artist, who in this venue meets four paintings made in the 1920s by the Polish avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński, loaned by the Muzeum Sztuki of Łódź.

The comparison with the “Architectural compositions” of the Polish painter and theorist and with his conception of painting as pure space, brings out formal and conceptual differences and affinities between two cultures and two historical periods now distant but also a relationship of continuity in the manipulation of painting and form. “We had something in common” explains Deininger “not in the contents but in the way of conceiving the painting and in the solutions we have reached. My painting is very concrete, more tied to materials, therefore certainly less abstract than Strzemiński’s. The difference between our period and his is in the fact that now we are not trying to find new ways of expressing but we are looking for our language, using all the languages ​​we know. My work is neither abstract nor evidently figurative. For me, painting is a kind of language. The goal is that all those who find themselves in front of a painting have a very concrete feeling and must invent a word to express it. “

Incredibly, looking at the balanced and rigorous aspect of her paintings, Svenja Deininger does not design her compositions or make preparatory drawings. It is all centered on a process that preserves its authenticity in a careful equidistance between logic and instinct. The image is constructed just like a passionate speech, in which each word pushes the thought towards its final destination without knowing it before. It is very important for the artist the possibility that her structures of form and color are then shaped and inhabited by the subjective interpretation and sensory emotions of the spectator, who finds himself immersed in an abstract universe mysteriously connected with the whispers of life.

The works on display, despite belonging to a unitary pictorial cycle carried out over a year, have very different characteristics: some show free strokes and irregular curves, others are more rational and geometric, others still seem to be the pictorial projection of an architectural study. In some cases the colors absorb the light without releasing it, in some paintings the surface seems to be caressed by a diaphanous luminosity, while in others the contours of the forms identify thin shady cavities whose mental depth we cannot intuit.

The textures are the result of a long experimentation in which painting has its divertissement pretending other materials, such as wood or fabric, engaging in the conceptual severity of abstraction almost a sort of virtuous complacency for its own possibilities to deceive and evade, as happened in past times. Traditional are also the preparations, based on plaster, glue and marble powder, which the artist uses to achieve the desired result, which often for her coincides with the discovery of a new imperfection.

If in distance vision the apparent idealization of her geometrizing imagination prevails, by approaching the painting (or enlarging on the computer screen an image with good resolution) we will discover all the irregularities of the human gesture, capable of feeding the secret mordant of a painting who refuses self-reference to turn to the world of fickle forms of sensitive existence. Many references to art history can be found in Deininger’s painting, such as American minimalism, Delaunay, Morandi and De Chirico. These reminiscences emerge not as intentional quotations but as emanations of the painter’s visual culture, further confirming the vitalistic matrix of a painting that incorporates what it desires into a tender gaze of love.

Info:

Svenja Deininger. Two Thoughts
8 March – 6 December 2020
Collezione Maramotti
Via Fratelli Cervi, 66 Reggio Emilia
http://www.collezionemaramotti.org/it