ITALIA ARTE

When photography was born and developed, between the two past centuries, it changed the way to relate to the nature, to the real, to the world: the traditional art, mainly painting, suddenly found a rival with an irresistible charm. Naturalness, immediateness, adhesion to the truth: the effects so long looked for by the artists of every times in order to give back to men documents and testimonies of an age found into this discipline pioneers' clicks the true, authentic essence of an immortality, perhaps short-lived, but in every way not before reachable but through the even flourishing portraiture, official and not.

After one century photography become allied to the painting, often its completion and they are many of authors who employ a sort of contamination of kinds in order to create new journeys and languages. The Maria Pia Taverna's work too is "daughter" of the XXth century, as well suits to a mature contemporary art, freed from the historical tradition of the figurative, which searches into the experimentation the most authentic expression of the I. But why experimentate? Why such a continuous searching for techniques, materials, chromatic and light effects in order to wake into men new and alternate horizons?

The answer must be found, as for the music and for the poetry, into the artist's intrinsic need to go to the depth amongst the meanders of our own sensation and emotions, even beyond our own feeling, in order to embrace world universality, in order to create a work which can be the mirror of the time and of the heart too. Maria Pia Taverna enjoy herself amongst the pigments melted on the cloth, the photographic images reflected, fragmentized and reassembled, oils and acrylics of different brightness and mellowness: but to such proceedings the artist joins the new element which moves the present and the future, it means technology.

The collage impressed on the cloth, the colour and material agglomerate, passes from the virtual state to the physical one, in order to allow itself to be touched, moulded, finished with the paint-brush with technique and know-how. The objective is as new as ancient and in that perhaps lies the Maria Pia Taverna's art main charm: the search for the new joins the desire for balance and harmony, ancient, classical canons, on which is based and built western art.

For that we feel those works so close to us, a bit gothic stained glass windows, into the mysticism of the searching for the men, a bit surreal glimpses of existence, provocative and introspective up to the autobiography, up to the self analysis, up to the dream. Those are works which from real, from an image vivified by the light impulse, by a photographic film takes an artistic valence because of the creative intervention of the hand and of the thought, of the idea and of the gesture of the artist, interior mirrors which narrate our hopes, our illusions too, in a very serious pictorial amusement.

Guido Folco