by Romina Ciulli and Carole Dazzi
The portrait, and the self-portrait, are the forms with which the artist Elisa Zadi investigates the bond between man and nature. A research that ranges from painting to installation, from performance to poetry, and that through an intimate and introspective path focuses on issues related to femininity, identity, and knowledge. In her works the human figure stands out in all its frank and refined frontality, giving life to a narrative that is not only pictorial, but above all anthropological and existential. Thus emerges a spontaneous and suggestive creative act, often represented through the fragmented idea of polyptychs, where the images seem to make use of a symbolic connotation to reflect on the complexity and fleetingness of everyday reality and human relationships.
A modus operandi that allows her to deepen from time to time concepts such as truth and beauty, and to express a deep and seductive interior world. We find these themes in her works, from Florilegium – Cruentum (2024) to Bruciare illusioni (2023), from Il tempo perduto (2022) to Mondi possibili (2021), from Status – inizio (2022) to Opera Viva (2021). Below the conversation with the artist.
In your works you use female subjects as conceptual symbols of a personal and collective research. Female figures, outlined with a palette of soft but vibrant colors, revealing the most hidden part of their emotions thanks to a process of identity renewal. Can you explain to us how this creative act starts?
The female figures I use are conceptual symbols of a personal and collective research referring to the feminine and linked to the archetype of the Mother as a creative principle. Figures and nature coexist in a pictorial reality that attempts to explore this generative dimension. The pictorial act is a genesis in itself, a daily ritual that is necessary for me to understand reality. Here I place myself in listening and as a medium I try to interpret, through the images that reveal themselves, a precise feeling. My works are thus born spontaneously through associations of images, directly on the support of the rough background of the fabric canvas that I prepare specifically. It is from a sensation or a memory, from a pregnant image that emerges from remembrance, or in the beauty of the present that I observe that the desire for knowledge is born and I am driven to fix a first formal element on the canvas. From here on I am taken to follow a journey and to compose the works that are created following that precise feeling. I try to interpret the sensations and let myself be guided by them, honestly and without fear towards the unknown, which is also a creative mystery. So the contingency, the acceptance of the unknown, not having pre-established ideas or full conceptual and material control over the work, are for me a choice that I find adherent to the sensitive reality that I live and by which I am surrounded. The soft colors are often obtained by mixing natural pigments with resin and turpentine essence in a variable dilution between matter and pictorial transparency, sometimes directly on the canvas without full control, experimenting in the field a coloristic alchemy that seeks harmony with its whole. The palette has slightly lowered tones to get closer to that primordial idea of rebirth and identity renewal that the creative act makes new every time, like an epiphany.
Nature is often at the center of your paintings. A nature with the characteristics of a woman and a mother, which expresses all its wild strength but also its fragility. As in the collection Florilegium – Cruentum (2024), where the juxtaposition of some specific plants generates a metaphysical dimension in which a connection is established between the human being and the natural one. Or, if we want, between the interior and the exterior world. How does nature influence your work?
Nature is for me a sort of mirror, a stargate placed between my interiority and the exteriority. Nature accompanies my work, it has the power to reconnect me to the profound sense of existence and belonging to it. When I am in the woods I feel a direct and strong energy that involves me in an indissoluble and mystical bond, which I then translate into a creative form. Nature is generative, Mother by archetype and, in this sense, the association with the female body arose spontaneously. The plants I choose are often wild, rustic and resilient, sometimes with a blunt appearance, they are protection but also an extension of a suffering, a threat that makes everything unstable and precarious.
There is always something sinister sealed by a dreamlike metaphysics of a dimension that seems perfect and ideal, but which in truth carries with it the precariousness of the contemporary reality that we are living. I perceive strength and fragility at the same time, and every sensation becomes true in its antithesis. I believe that small everyday events, such as the blooming of a flower or a catastrophe, have the same value on different scales and are still interconnected even at a distance of space or time. For this reason in painting these forces can act, concentrate, mix and change in harmony. Time and space are circular, eternal, internal and relative, and in all this I feel a great freedom of experimentation and creation that pushes my work forward.
In Bruciare illusioni (2023) you exploit the possibilities of self-portraiture to reflect on themes such as female identity and belonging. In this way a pictorial narrative develops that, using the symbolism of fire, seems to (re)lead us to our authenticity. Why do you prefer this pictorial form to carry forward your artistic research?
In this pictorial series I explored, through the symbolism of fire, the concept of destruction of illusions and false conformities imposed by the cultural context in which we live to allow an awakening that reconnects us to our essence. Fire is thus a symbol of burning passions, of destruction, but also of rebirth which, as in the work “Fenice”, has within itself the power to rise from its own ashes. In this case the self-portrait was congenial to claim an identity position, a sort of revenge of the individual on the increasingly homogenizing and repressive social context. I sense a prevarication, not only of gender, but a violent social power that tends towards spiritual and supportive annihilation. My appearance, my image as presence, the repetition of some poses, as a voluntary and obsessive act, wants to be a response to this tendency of cancellation, a resistance, a hope for change, a redemption and affirmation of being rather than a surrender to this destruction of identity.
Another constant theme of your works is that of truth. The series of works Mondi possibili (2022), for example, is inspired by the notion of possible worlds of the philosopher G. W. Leibiniz, or the ideas of perfect worlds present in the mind of God, to go in search of truth and, consequently, of knowledge of oneself and of the world. A path not devoid of illusions but which, despite this, seems to emanate a certain charm and a certain seduction. Can you tell us about this project?
The project originates from the reflection on the idea of Reality and Truth. Of how these two concepts often coincide in what I observe, originating a sort of beauty linked to the sublime. The best possible reality is the one that exists. Nature is always the best example of this. Let’s take a flower or a plant: the manifestation of its existence is unique and the best possible. It grows in a given place, at a precise moment and bears witness to an important passage of this Reality which is also Truth. This applies to everything in a universal way: everything represents the best possible version of itself based on the circumstances. Even this reality that we are living, despite everything, is the best possible. These concepts have been a sort of trigger on the vision of the things that surround me, they have given me a deep inspirational force. And my painting has changed and I with it. Truths in fact are contingent, free and true only in the possible world that exists. The infinite truths manifest themselves, sometimes they are found, others we must understand, judge if these are true, authentic.
My painting seeks this Truth, the best possible granted to me. My works do not seek any decorative effect, much less any talented technicality. I focus on the experience of doing, on the introspection of research as a necessity. Painting like installation, performance or poetry are a means that allows me to experiment and live the creative act in its essence. My works are born from the intellectual honesty of feeling my limits, of investigating them through a cleanliness of vision that leads to the simplicity of being, to the hic et nunc. I always try to represent reality as it is in that moment, without idealism. Only in this way I can attempt to restore beauty to its authenticity. And it is precisely in the miraculous manifestation of beauty and my limits in grasping it that I began to reflect and work on what then became the works of a series that I am still carrying forward that I have called “Mondi Possibili”.
The project Tempo perduto (2022) refers instead to the metaphor of “liquidity” of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Here the ephemeral, “fluid”, continuously changing tendency of reality and human relations is rendered through a series of brush strokes that pass from fading to materialization, from preparatory drawings to colored and well-defined subjects. A sort of intelligible superposition that makes the painting almost a written story. Can you explain the reason of this choice?
I want all the steps in my work to be visible and clear as if it were a writing. From the preparation of the raw fabric support to the figures that emerge from it, I try to enhance each step of the creative process, respecting both the drawing and the areas of color, the execution time and the contingency. The very diluted and horizontally worked color fields want to explore precisely randomness through the free flow of the material and accept it as a value of non-control, an inevitable limit also present in my existence that I try to welcome and integrate into painting.
And so the overlaps symbolize relationship and empathy, a sort of fusion between the elements that appear on the canvas, exploring balances between full and empty, in which the rough background of the canvas becomes a metaphysical and scenic space of a turquoise chromatic vibration that has long accompanied my work. Some elements then repeat themselves by subject or by posture, flaunting their presence like a distant echo that asks to emerge and exist in the history of the pictorial work. And so a Proustian title “Il Tempo Perduto” is born, in which a series of figures seek a connection between themselves and with nature. The works represent the challenge of being part of a reality in continuous change and movement, according to Bauman’s theories on the liquidity of human relations and on precariousness. This work aims to reflect and investigate the complexity and ephemerality of modern life, in which human relationships and the connection between them and with nature can easily escape and change.
Status – Inizio (2022) is a site-specific pictorial installation created to emphasize the importance of the man/nature bond. The work is in fact inspired by Plato’s myth of the cave to create an immersive symbolic and conceptual path. Can you tell us about it?
The enjoyment of a work of art should be a sensorial and synaesthetic experience that can lead the viewer to explore the concept of discovery and wonder. In this work I tried to reawaken this sense and convey the idea of a cave, illuminating the work with natural candlelight through a pictorial installation that invited the viewer to make a spatial path of movement around and inside the work. Working in a site-specific place triggers a deep sense of relationship between the work and the space, moving a feeling of belonging to the place that becomes logos. And so the myth of Plato’s cave was a reference, thinking that the enjoyment of the work could be symbolically lived as an experience and that led the viewer to ask questions and to be stimulated to go beyond observation, towards a symbolic and interior light. Approaching the pictorial works that make up the installation and which represent the constituent elements, earth, fire, air, water, I thought that the spectator could also be awakened in his own ancestral sensitivity in this experience.
Opera Viva (2021) is instead a performance created thanks to the complicity of the public. An interactive work that is born in the moment, based on the observation of the other and which gives life, through a shared pictorial act, to the image of a face that is never the same as its reflection. Can you tell us how this project was born and what reactions did you intend to provoke in the spectator?
Opera Viva is part of a series of relational performances (such as “Cara Enfanta” and “Blu Guado”) that I experiment to better understand the relationship with the public, trying to make them participants and protagonists of the work. Often, in fact, the spectator experiences the completed work and remains detached from it, enjoying it only after its realization. Instead with these works I would like to eliminate this distance and invite them to create, to make them become active protagonists in the becoming of the work. In this case, in “Opera Viva”, we become participants and accomplices of the same creative act, putting ourselves both on the same level of comparison and relationship with ourselves and at the same time with the other, through both observation in the mirror and direct observation of our face. And the motor restitution of a sensorial and extemporaneous drawing that we create goes to depict a face, often ours, but which then becomes by force of things universal. The tilting structure placed at the center of the work is a barrier and a “portal”, a screen and a hiding place for a free observation that triggers an intense and creative experience with the participant. The brevity of time forces concentration and a cleansing of preconceived ideas about everything. One is moved to act following an expressive impulse that liberates and unites in the sharing and complicity that is created at the moment, thus discovering a common intimacy and a knowledge of the other that, thanks to creation, go beyond conventional canons. “Opera Viva” thus becomes a cognitive experience that uses the pictorial medium as a means of a silent dialogue, made of observation and direct restitution and that is expressed through the universal laws of communication of the image.
Are there any artists who have inspired or continue to inspire your work?
I am constantly inspired by what surrounds me, both by the simplicity of everyday events, and by art in various forms. In addition to painting, music, poetry and cinema are very important to me. Obviously there are always historical and indelible figures of Masters such as Piero della Francesca, Pontormo and Michelangelo, who are periodically joined by contemporary examples. All these artists form an intimate and familiar imagery that, in a dialogic way, enriches me every time in the experience of knowledge and deepening.
Can you tell us briefly about your future projects?
I would like to think about projects that can include my experiences in painting, performance and installation together. In 2025 I will have institutional and non-institutional exhibitions, I hope to be able to work in this direction. In the spring, as winner of the Mavare Prize, I will exhibit in a solo show at ForoG Gallery in Messina, in a project curated by Mariateresa Zagone and Roberta Guarnera. Subsequently I will have the opportunity to work with the MuPa Museum in Ginosa under the curatorship of the artistic director Piero Giannuzzi. I am currently exhibiting in the double solo show Charlie Davoli – Elisa Zadi in “ Life Is but a day”, curated by Maria Vittoria Pinotti with Mucciaccia Gallery Project in Rome, under the artistic direction of Giulia Abate, and I hope that this working relationship can be the beginning of a new creative path.