Marta Ravasi

Refined, subdued, yet effective and impactful, the painting of Marta Ravasi (Merate, Lecco, Italy, 1987) focuses on small format, a feeling of metaphysical silence and expressive economy. An intense and controlled practice that is confirmed in the oil on canvas made for the Cairo Prize, simply titled Mandarins. Repeated layers of color, at first slow and mellow then faster and freer, determine during the long process subtle and progressive variations, “a continuous redefinition of the material,” as the artist says. Thus is gradually created the background atmosphere of the painting, its “emotional temperature.” Only in the second stage is the subject, or rather the pictorial pretext, chosen: in this case, a composition of fruits that takes up and at the same time challenges the traditional concept of still life. The subject, which becomes part of the painting and is transfigured within it, comes, as always, from a personal archive that the artist composes and keeps at his disposal, a sampling of “generic” images taken from social media: visual stereotypes that become singular and unique once transposed into painting. Ultimately, an anti-rhetorical style devoid of narrative, all the more expressive precisely because it is subdued and free of proclamation, whose intent is to “perpetuating the language of painting by allowing it to self-generate, introducing endless variations and possibilities within a specific field, that of the canvas.”