« It’s like the Light -

A fashionless Delight -

It’s like the Bee -

A dateless - Melody - »

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Emily Dickinson, extract of a poem from Une âme en incandescence (Cahier n°12)

Gallery Elsa Meunier is pleased to present the work by the Italian painter Marta Ravasi on the

occasion of the exhibition « Fresca » . This is the artist’s first personal exhibition in Paris and the

first collaboration between the gallery and the artist.

Fruit that will never be lost, flowers that will never wither, Marta Ravasi's paintings are regenerated

landscapes that move with each stage of the day, even questioning the term “still life” that defines

her subjects, so vital is the fresh thickness of her paint.

The artist detaches herself from the principle of a realistic representation of her model to translate it,

through a system of repetition and tactile exploration of the paint, into the very physicality of the

pictorial material. In this way, the downy skin of a peach, the glaze of a freshly cut slice of melon,

all come to the fore. The tightly structured framing, blurred in a cameo of yellow-brown, powder

pink and white tones, leaves no room for doubt: the surface will not be traced, but rather gorged

with a creamy, fluid oil. If Marta Ravasi's paintings were a dessert, you'd eat them with your fingers.

Marta Ravasi's abstraction is, in depth, an accumulation of ‘nows’. Present times superimposed

beneath the layers of time and space in which they occurred. In their creation, the canvases move

around, seeking out their corner of light or shadow in a back-and-forth movement between

oppressive heat and the lightness of a breeze. I see in it the very pretext for painting, for capturing

the peak of a vital, mature impulse, on the verge of toppling over into a deterioration that never

comes. Or perhaps, on the contrary, the trace of what is already no more. The very idea of a natural

cycle that balances itself out, promises to return, but encourages us to take full advantage of it.

 

Eloïse Duguay

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