Through June 20, 2018
Museo dei Bozzetti, Italy
A guest blog post by Simona Dolci
“The sweet noise of life,” a phrase taken from a poem by Sandro Penna, is the perfect title to bring together my paintings and the sculptures by Paddy Campbell in this fine art exhibition. The series of paintings displayed follow two themes that are important for me because they concern my artistic investigation in recent years.
The first theme deals with the cycle of VENERI (Venuses), which I consider as having been concluded for some time. The artists of the past depicted the Venuses as figures without time or age; true iconic images. The Venuses of the past are ideas, not individuals; they are ideals that are depicted and embodied in symbolic images clothed in beauty.
Contemporary artists who take on imagery this powerful — one of humanity’s innermost images — know that the archetype remains the same; what changes is the way it is depicted. The Venuses of our world, the modern Venus is an individual woman with her own personality, well aware of her true body and her very human imperfections.
The other theme concerns the masculine. This is also a cycle and is still being worked on: MALES of love, males of war.
I believe that theatre is one of the artistic fields that more easily lends itself to depicting the way in which the human world is explored and known. The actor, a figure with a changing personality, is able to change and transform himself. Yet, due to the fact that he can be many different personalities, often lives immersed in solitude.
One of the great characters in theater, Yago, like Judas, is regarded as contemptible, a traitor. Is he really the figure of evil or is he the enchanter, the narrator, the magnificent weaver of plots, albeit malevolent, who reveals passions and makes events possible, as any teller of tales can do?
Of course, then there are the myths. Mercury, the symbolic image that corresponds perfectly to the contemporary world, who is characterized by speed, communication, connection, deception, money. Narcissus, who in the refraction and multiplication of his own image loses his identity, nullifying himself in its shattering.
I am an architect by training and a painter by vocation. I am also a teacher; in the past, in the Faculty of Architecture, and today at a private art school, The Florence Academy of Art. I teach drawing to young artists who come from all over the world to learn how to draw as our forefather-artists did.
I hope that one day the fracture that exists in the world of representative art, which still underscores a division between modern art and classical art, the art of ideas and the art of figuration, can be remedied, as has happened and is already happening in other artistic fields such as music and dance. With my work, I would like to continue in this direction.
I try to use techniques in realism with the contemporary spirit of a modern woman who has lived all the seasons of commitment and experimentation of her own generation, and who today proudly claims this role as a figurative artist.
More information: www.simonadolci.com
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