THE COLLAGE BY SILVIA BELTRAMI by Giorgio Bonomi

 

■"It is difficult, in today's scene of young and/or emerging art, to find someone who knows how to combine manual dexterity (that famous “tékhnē”, a word with which the ancient Greeks indicated “art”) with the ability to linguistic innovation (result of a careful research) and with a choice of themes (the content of the work of art) that are current and such as to arouse in the observer thoughts and reflections: well, all these aspects can be found in the poetic and, of course, in the realizations by Silvia Beltrami. The artist – who is also a very skilful drawer and is able to paint “perfect” naturalistic images, but these are performed only occasionally to “keep the hand in practice” - works with the collage of cuttings of very different kind of paper (from newspapers, magazines, wallpaper and many more): with these “cuttings”, that look like the pieces of a mosaic, in her latest works Beltrami organizes a speech on hardboard’s panels, while before she used to work on “fresco’s tears”, that is to say using that classical very fine technique to prepare the surfaces on which then she applied her figures. Beltrami works, from the point of view of the contents which, of course, also affect the production technique, for “cycles”. Before going into the analysis of these cycles, we have to point out that her compositions appear as a sort of “explosion” that “scatters” pieces of that original image, appearing dialectically with a double movement: in one way it seems that the explosion , a sort of big bang, applies a centrifugal force “dispersive” that from the nucleus launches into orbit or in a linear flight the particles; in another, instead, the image may appear as equipped with a centripetal force to which those individual fragments are “sucked” by the central figure or figures, in a sort of magnetic attraction or absorption in a “black hole”, to use once again terms borrowed from physics.(read more)

Giorgio Bonomi (Art historian and curator)

 

---

 LIMBO BY ELLEN MAURER ZILIOLI


■Silvia Beltrami, born in Rome in 1974 and for quite some time now living in northern Italy, is regarded as the young, very promising representative of an unusual art form. She devotes herself to a refreshingly contemporary interpretation of collage. Holder of a diploma from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, the artist works mainly with wallpaper and newsprint on used cardboard or rendered canvas to create her dynamic and vibrant compositions.
Deploying extraordinary dexterity and astonishing powers of visualisation, Beltrami transfers visual ideas developed in small formats to large surfaces. With a deft hand she designs complex picture spaces and figurative ensembles.
Silvia Beltrami concentrates on selected current phenomena and problems afflicting contemporary society. She examines, for instance, the defamiliarising effect of fashion and consumer pressures on young people, with the concomitant ego dissolution and loss of identity caused by superficiality and addiction to the contemporary "me culture", along with the anonymity and pressure for success generated by the working environment.
Beltrami is not so much concerned with critically reflecting on lifestyle trends as she is with neutrally, although occasionally partially observing what belongs to her generation. Seismographically registering the tension and its discharge, she hurls herself into her motifs with passion and empathy nonetheless underpinned by prudent neutrality.

Ellen Maurer Zilioli (Art historian and curator)