Metamorphoses: A chromatic palette that transforms into an ethereal emotional alphabet

Born in Locarno in Canton Ticino, the artist Raffaella Soffiantini lives and works between Lugano and Carnago (Varese). She is a painter and sculptress (see the fine bronze Self-portrait) who combines a vigorous chromatic structure with a freely informal and lyrical abstract style in her painting.

Raffaella started painting relatively recently, in 2017. In her youth, she was an elite gymnast in the Swiss national team of Rhythmic Gymnastics, a discipline which she also taught for several years. Raffaella now passionately devotes herself to painting and more recently also to sculpture in a solid and proficient manner, and her work is already known on the market in Switzerland and Northern Italy. She has had a long life journey as well as her professional one in other fields too, which she has skilfully transferred to her artistic career, having a valuable layer of experiences as a base, without which she may never have come to start painting or, at least, not with this value of form, content and technique or with her existential message that is peculiar to her art. As the Greeks and Aristotle would have said, it is a union of Λόγος (Lògos, reason, rationality, logical structure) and Πάθος (Pathos, emotion, sentiment, empathy), but always with ἦθος (Èthos), which is accompanied by a rigorous way of life. Thus, her coloured forms transform, as if under the effects of an enchanted ancient metamorphosis, from a ‘chromatic painting’ to a spiritual book, to an intimate and captivating diary which reconciles you, the observer, spiritually to yourself and to others.

Indisputably in its Lyrical abstraction, her work can be considered part of the consolidated twentieth-century school of Art Informel together with Conceptual art, suspended, as it is, between Abstract expressionism and Lyrical abstraction.

The artist’s abstract and expressionist brushstrokes contain not only - yet not predominantly - the American experience of action painting, of Pollock's drip painting and Rothko's color fields, but perhaps more so, the European influence (of Mathieu’s and Emilio Vedova’s gestural signs and Antonio Corpora’s Lyrical abstraction and Burri's Matter painting) and, in particular, the great German tradition, charged with imposing emotionality and idealism, above all in Wols’s “gestural expressiveness of feelings”, together with the assemblage of objects on the canvas that characterised the Nouveau Réalisme in the work by Arman. The artist merges a multiplicity of cultural ideas into a completely personal unicum, transforming them according to her own, original declination. As she herself affirms, “with any type of label or classification, one can be several things at the same time”, even though, in the final analysis, she always remains a single and articulate identity.

These references to artistic movements, which can be seen in the artist’s work, albeit in different declinations and intensities, is clearly limited only to the aesthetic factor, so to speak, to the formal aspect. To truly understand her works, we must also consider them in their deeper and more peculiar conceptual component, which makes the true difference between a nice painting that is technically and formally correct and an artistic work. There is a strong vital energy in her paintings. Indeed, she transmits all her life experiences, her passion, fears and her existential instincts in them with suffused pathos. Her paintings give us a glimpse of pessimistic clouds and stormy and abysmal vortexes, but at the same time they also open up skies of light, hope and absolute and universal love.

The Freudian allusions in her brushstroke gestures and colours transform her works (especially the very latest ones from 2022) into ‘works of Art’, precisely because they are not limited to pure aesthetics, but are conceptual journeys of a life lived in all its aspects of beauty and tribulations, with that existential disquiet by which we mature, with a new understanding of life, which Soffiantini transmits to us through her painting. Over and above an analysis of the art works from a historical-artistic point of view, it is also perhaps the art critic’s task to reveal them to allow a deeper understanding and interpretation for who will view them. For some of them we can speak of a Beauty that saves one, becoming, for those who observe them, a medicine of life, for the eyes and for the spirit. Art, when it is truly art, is nothing but an emanation of the soul and energy that coalesces in the colour on the canvas. Through art the barriers of isolation, egoism and blindness, ignorance and rational interests, fall away. At times there is almost a sense of plummeting into the abysmal vortex of depression, in its inertia that slowly kills, but then we see a return to life - albeit with difficulty - and a pursuit of interests, with a new interpretation and empathy that had not been perceived before and that Raffaella conveys through her painting.

Colour as pure and absolute emotion, landscapes of the mind and spirit, in a palette made up of matter, of acrylic pigments and a variety of other materials (including sand, modelling pastes, glue, volumizers, salvaged objects) that creates, almost musically, depth and fugues, adagi or mossi. Hers is a form of painting - with origins in Art informel, dominated (especially in the latest production, as I have already mentioned) by the use of matter, which allows itself to be manipulated until it blends, to offer three-dimensional tactile sensations. The canvas becomes the field in which the meeting-conflict between matter, white and black, red and gold, green, blue and silver come to a head. Fundamentally, it is an intimate theatrical stage of contrasts.

The artist is both a quiet and restless ‘seer’, and with an untiring lightness, she outlines her most intimate diary on those canvases. Raffaella Soffiantini seeks a significance - and a name (Absolute, Cosmos, One, Infinite) - for the spirit that illuminates her hand and soothes the wounds of her soul. Her works are not academically pre-formulated but come about while she is working on the canvas: the forms come from the colour, that are more intuited than completely ‘formed’. It is an art in the making, in which the elaboration and the journey are decisive to reveal – only at the end - a chromatic image of the spirit. It is no coincidence that she paints after having felt an unstoppable impulse (an ἀνάγκη pingendi, where the Greek anànke is a fatal necessity and inevitability, in this case to paint, and a value of cosmogonic strength) and when the work is finished she must rest (it is ἀνάπαυσις, anàpausis: relief, rest, cessation, suspension, but also ἡσυχία, exiuchìa: stillness, rest, peace, silence, solitude), as she feels totally exhausted, as if she has been emptied, as if an entirely secular transubstantiation of her soul has taken place on the canvas. In this way, she shares her own existential and ‘eschatological’ experiences in her works and in this case, we really can speak, as previously said, of a ‘redemptive’ Beauty.

Ultimately, her canvases become letters of an inner, intimate and ethereal alphabet, a sort of diary marked by her experiences that are gifted to everyone (or, at least, for those who are willing to look and not just see, to listen and not simply to hear). Each letter of this painted ‘abcedarium’ becomes a sentiment, an emotion, a memory or an experience (sometimes painful and distressing, but ultimately always constructive) to communicate and share, art as therapy of the body and spirit: “A” for Amore (Love),“B” for Bellezza (Beauty), “C” for Casa (Home),“D” for Dolore (Pain) and so on. Painting is an expressive freedom, through which the wounds of the soul can heal and be freed, whilst in constant discussion and without expecting to reach a final destination. Sometimes they are truly ‘pictorial sculptures’. Colour and matter are oxymoronic pathways of ethereal inner transparencies.

In an extreme synthesis, Raffaella has taken the blue lotus flower (蓮, Hasu in Japanese) as the symbol of herself and her art. Indeed, this splendid flower (which plants its roots in the mud of the river or pond bed) is a symbol of rebirth and vital regeneration, of spiritual elevation and of the ability to recover from difficulties, adversities and unpleasantness we encounter in the world (the mud) to rework, transform or metamorphose them into beauty and a new positive energy. It symbolizes the will to overcome the adversities of life and moreover in this variant of colour, it represents the victory of spirituality over passions and attachment to just earthly things.

I will now make some brief reflections on the twenty-two paintings exhibited in Monreale, a city which profoundly impressed Raffaella Soffiantini for its beauty and charm, so much so as to name it, in her heart, as her spiritual ‘homeland’. All these works were made in 2022, with the exception of two (Silenzio from 2020 and Anime from 2021).

In Fiamme interiori (Inner Flames) (the work also chosen for the catalogue cover), the canvas is substantially divided into two sections: the lower area is dominated by the red of the fire that devastates and destroys, burns the soul and torments as if in hell, but also purifies and refines, mitigates and moulds, giving light and life. In this way, through being tested and the fire, we can open ourselves up to the blue heavens of the spirit (represented in the upper section of the painting), where the silvery-white ethereal smoke rises and radiates from the fire like dissolving larvae. It is therefore the purifying inner test that becomes a stage in the evolution of the soul: you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit and fire, says Matthew in his Gospel (3,11); it is after the great tribulation that the robes become white, as allegorically affirmed in the Revelation (7,14). The painting therefore becomes an epiphany (or declaration) of life.

Pioggia (Rain) is a painting composed entirely in tones of blue, azure, white and gold. The colours dissolve and liquefy, they mingle like the polychrome fragments of a landscape seen in the reflections on a paved road in the rain, with similarities to some nineteenth-century visions of the Impressionist or Macchiaioli painters. The vision, however, is an inner one and, in the humidity that we can almost feel in our bones, in that fading away and almost ‘cleansing’ of the landscape, among those sketches that fragment the image, the spirit regenerates to reach a restorative calm and tranquillity.

The formal reference in Riflessi in uno stagno (Reflections in a pond) is clearly the visions of water lilies in the last paintings by Monet with his ‘aquatic’ dream. The shimmering effects of light and colour dazzle the mind, creating an opulent background that is more poignant than those flowers, to which the gold and red glistening stains in the kaleidoscope of a dream-like afternoon allude. A tremulous and changing landscape, transforming to remain ever coherent with itself, and as Proust wrote, “with that which is most profound, most fleeting, most mysterious - with that which is infinity - in the now”. Water flowers, tender water lilies as a first sketch of life that also look to certain powerful paintings, the so-called Paludosi, by Antonio Pedretti.

Corteccia (Tree bark) too, in its nod to art informel, represents nature and makes the viewer understand how the highest form of abstraction is already contained within the verism of nature, that it is not man’s invention or a pure conquest of twentieth century art, but it is already inherent in reality, both in the cellular microworld and in the macrocosm of the universe with star clusters. At this point, perhaps Plato would be almost right to consider art only and always a mere imitation (of the exterior and natural world), were it not for the fact that man infuses that art informel - that soulless land - with a creative spirit, that ‘divine’ vital breath that already gave life to Adam in Genesis. And so it is that in that golden bark of a peeling tree, Soffiantini infuses it with her ‘spirit’, lighting it up with a sense of profound innerness. The shell within which we close ourselves, wounded by life and adversity, the armour behind which we try in vain to protect ourselves, must break and crumble to open up to life and to others, to come out from within, where otherwise the whirlpool of depression would suffocate us and we would die.

Tutto scorre (Everything flows) is another abstract image of reflections on the tremulous water of a river, where one can perhaps identify the ripples of the liquid in slow but relentless movement. Allusion to Heraclitus’ πάντα ῥεῖ (pànta rèi, everything flows): everything is in permanent flux. Man can never have the same experience twice because, in its apparent reality, it is subjected to the inexorable law of change. Raffaella seems to suggest that in this ephemeral becoming, only the Lògos, or self-awareness, can infuse a profound harmony that governs the perennial dialectic and gives a significance and identity to life.

In Tramonto in palude (Marshland at dusk), through the rapidly fluctuating succession of colours of a fiery red sunset, shining like a joyful carnival, we find a marked lyricism, which again reveals a nod to Monet's impressionism and the Pedrettian theme of marsh flowers, as well as a reminder of certain matterism-art informel sketches, which are both dark and luminous at the same time, of the landscapes of Brianza by Pietro Maggioni.

Apertura alla libertà (Opening up to freedom) represents a stylistic evolution compared to the artist’s previous works, due to the inclusion of objects glued on the pictorial support, with a formal reference to Arman's Accumulations. But the meaning is entirely different. While employing means that were dear to Duchamp’s Dadaism and Neo-Dadaism, the intent is not to controversially argue how anything can become art or how the waste of the society of unbridled consumption can give rise to a new identity and life (as in Arman’s case), but how an object of daily use inserted onto the canvas, an old key in the centre of the black gridlines painted on a red monochrome background, alludes to the opening of a grate or of a prison door where we are imprisoned. Raffaella thereby indicates - after many physical and spiritual adversities and tribulations - her starting life afresh with a new freedom, that of a human person and a woman, in a society that still, beyond the more or less hypocritical claims, seems to imprison in a racist way entire populations, categories, people and the woman herself.

Then we find Primavera (Spring) once again an indirect reference to certain works by Pedretti, despite the originality of that emerald green that brings to mind the marshy waters rich in algae. And so too, Incanto cromatico (Chromatic enchantment) alludes to a landscape that is transformed into an interior vision.

With Lacerazioni (Lacerations) we move to the next level, where the work becomes more gestural and full of matter, rigid like a three-dimensional relief map made of different materials. The creases, the deep ‘cuts’ (like canyons), the violent blood-red stains allude to the drama of a soul’s wound and the intense chromatism and the explosive sign become pure Wols-like gestural pathos. This can also be seen in Grido (Scream) - note that open, blood red ‘mouth’ on the left-hand side - where an inconsolable vision of suffering and of disruptive and agonising cosmic pain, is abstractly Munch-like. However, it is an expressionist ‘scream’ that frees the soul from unbearable pressure.

Interruzione (Interruption) is of a similar style: it is a powerful and dark, explosive representation that is emotionally devastating, where that central red 'heart' seems to break and tear into the black that surrounds it and the broken glass, inserted between the unbending folds of a colour that is thick and full of matter, stops the fleeting moment in which life seems to stop forever. Monocromo (Monochrome) is technically similar, but the musicality of the work becomes calmer and more intimate, whilst based on the eternal and complementary opposites of black and white, with gestural similarities to Vedova’s art.

The creases are emphasized in the homonymous painting (Increspature – Creases) in this purple monochrome (not entirely monochromatic as it has gold smears like fantastic exotic or volatile flowers), where crumpled fabric entirely envelops the support and overflows in an irregular manner over the sides, as if the painting were being ‘wrapped’, following a practice carried out by several other contemporary artists.

Sintesi di paesaggio (Synthesis of a landscape) is an abstract vision, in which, as the title itself suggests, Soffiantini synthesizes the image through horizontal ‘bands’, with green at the bottom (allusion to a close-up of a lawn), then orange-red-gold (which brings to mind a field cultivated with wheat or poppies) to the blue (of the sky). Here the compositional-chromatic references are to certain landscapes by Ennio Morlotti, to Rothko’s color fields and to some of Salvatore Emblema’s woven canvases.

Tormento (Torment), on the other hand, in its diluted tones of purple and in the gestures of the zigzagging brushstrokes to create whirlpools of colour, formally suggests the breaking of foamy sea waves against a cliff, where the artist's thought becomes shipwrecked in the abysses of the unconscious, with its Wagnerian resonances like a bewitching short tale, a disenchanted and sad Lorelei among the waves of the River Rhine, as depicted by Heine in his poem of 1824, Alfredo Catalani’s vocal score of 1887 or as Otto Vermeher painted her in the late 19th century. But the feelings we experience in front of this work are the same as those we have when we look at Caspar David Friedrich's The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a romantic, vibrant sense of the sublime, a cosmic sea in which the observer lost himself, contemplating in astonishment, in his nakedness, with his soul, his faith, with all his uncertainties, mistakes and doubts.

Iris is once again a homage to nature in its chromatic explosion full of matter, as well as to the blossoming of this spring flower, a symbol of the Florentine hills since the nineteenth century, dear to the Anglo-American colony who lived in the city. Vibrazioni (Vibrations), on the other hand, takes us back to the tremulous flow of water (with its three-dimensional ripples against the monochrome blue background), on which flowers and golden petals float in an art informel manner.

Anime (Spirits) is a kaleidoscope of glimmering colours made up of expressive gold and red ‘marks’ which, in their vertical streaks on the canvas, can be seen as quivering ectoplasms in the light of a paradisiacal love of danteseque fame, “which moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradise, Canto XXXIII), but also in the secular “love that speaks fervently in my mind”, (Rime, LXXXI).

There is also a painting entitled Silenzio (Silence) that chronologically belongs to a first series of works painted by Raffaella. It is a work that is ‘unmatter-like’, almost watery in its transparent nature, as if it were a watercolour, of a wonderful sunset that becomes a despondent, intimate and existential reflection, made up of the last lights of the day and the soft mists that then envelop the earth; all intuited rather than depicted in their formal objectivity. But in that abstraction, made of pure colour with its graded infinite nuances, there is the sense and essence of a nostalgic sunset, of that hour which, as Dante again wrote, “'Twas now the hour that turneth back desire / In those who sail the sea, and melts the heart, / The day they've said to their sweet friends farewell, / And the new pilgrim penetrates with love, / If he doth hear from far away a bell / That seemeth to deplore the dying day,” (Purgatory, Canto VIII). In Soffiantini’s lyrical abstraction, we find all the magical feeling that is present in the final abstract watercolours by Antonio Corpora or in certain sketchy skies of Marrakech dreamed and painted by Salvatore Magazzini.

Finally, there are two untitled works, that are, so to speak, ‘aerial’, or hung with invisible nylon thread which rotate on themselves. Circular works like coins and, like the coins, have two sides. One, shaped like a small flower bed, made up of stones, moss, artificial lichens and wood, refers to ikebana and oriental gardens, but also to today’s vertical gardens created on building elevations. They also have similarities to the gigantic works by Swedish Pop artist Claes Oldenburg and to Pietro Gilardi's polyurethane foam nature carpets. The other refers to the cosmic disk of a planet or moon, abstract and rough in its matter and wrinkled, rough and cracked chromatic surface, which formally compares to the well-known Moons by Paola Romano. In this way Soffiantini also confronts ecological issues, denouncing man for transforming nature into an aseptic and completely artificial reality.

Raffaella is also a draughtswoman, creating convincing subjects more or less latently figurative, which look to the dynamism of futurism, with their swirling masses, ellipses and figures that intertwine in a phantasmagorical tangle. There are also surreal assonances, where memories, sensations and emotions are expressed, on the wings of an evocative and dreamlike calligraphic intimism.

These drawings are actually her earliest work and those exhibited almost all date back to 2019, an important, and in some ways dramatic, year in the artist's life. As we understand from the swirling shapes, from the vibrant and ‘violent’ colours and as the titles themselves reveal, they represent an interior reading of Raffaella's soul which, after a traumatic event almost foretold by a calm before the storm, slowly opens up to life once more, on the notes of a daydream (with ‘jazz’ sounds), made up of freedom and unconditional love. The breathing expands to fly up, the masks fall, the cosmic pulse is perceived. The forms of a Picasso-like self-portrait are lost in futurist geometries, large eyes (mirrors on innerness, as seen in some Futurist collages: just think of the FuturOcchio from 1915 by the then very young Giuseppe Ciotti, where the ‘new’ look was in contrast with the old conformist vision symbolised by the Argor advert “for those with eye problems”), which open surrealistically in ellipses and circles and hearts that empathetically dialogue with strange creatures. In the transparent breath of colour one can almost make out abstract animals and in a static form one can almost sense a still life in the pop art-like manner of Tano Festa. And again, the flight of a seagull superimposes a heart, intertwining, overlapping, accelerating, contracting and imploding, in the dynamic colours of a Giacomo Balla, chosen and ‘selected’ by the mind's eye even before seeing it, with its ‘musical’ notes, in dynamic counterpoint, between the emotional and existential Improvisation Jazz of Afro-American ancestry of the New Orleans bars (think of the well-known piece Body and Soul, composed in 1930), the bebop style of Charlie Parker and the more subdued Cool Jazz that flowed from Shorty Rogers’s trumpets.

Raffaella Soffiantini is an artist from whom we can look forward to seeing much more over the forthcoming years.

Giampaolo Trotta

Metamorphoses: A chromatic palette that transforms into an ethereal emotional alphabet

Metamorphoses: Una tavolozza cromatica che si tramuta in un etereo alfabeto emozionale.

Presentazione della mostra “Metamorphoses” di Raffaella Soffiantini a Monreale - 2022

News Buy Art Contact