The "four seasons" of Passalacqua on display

(…) A path lived with intensity, carrying on and trying to renew the Futurist language, that of Giacomo Balla in particular, from the “iridescent interpenetrations” to the contrasts of shapes and colors of the “Optimism and Pessimism” cycle. (…) For the occasion, forty works by Passalacqua are exhibited, dedicated, in the last three years, to the theme of the “Four Seasons”, which then evoke the entire life cycle and its inexhaustible renewal. The alternation of the seasons, as well as by the colors from time to time bright or cold but always powerful, is also marked by a whirlwind of shapes that overlap suggesting the profound upheavals that run through nature and the human soul itself.

Lina Passalacqua: the four seasons

(…) The works exhibited allow us to grasp, in addition to the technical knowledge and the preciousness of the pictorial fabric, the refined sensitivity with which the artist translates the internal creative pulsations. While evoking the futurist matrix in the dynamism of signs, they propose a lyrical abstractionism of great expressive power from which emerges the intensity of an interior excavation conducted into the most unfathomable depths of the soul. "His" seasons are a clear metaphor of life in its flow, from the spring moment to its ineluctable decline, but even more they are a metaphor of the infinite cyclicality of existence in which the path of the individual appears as a dazzling vital fragment, a suspended note of poetry inserted in the harmonic score of the cosmos. (...)

The five seasons of Lina Passalacqua

(...) In reality, the most striking thing about this new cycle is the creation of a sort of fifth season that interweaves all the others, mixing the red glow of summer, the rusty tones of autumn, the snowy vapors of 'winter and the budding palette of spring, in a time out of time, which welcomes its sharp brushstrokes, the almost futuristic intertwining of perspectives and plans, imposing on us the slowness of pause and gaze. An accomplice and close look that treats the landscape as a whirlwind of shapes and colors: leaves that swell like sails, sharp branches, flaky skies, caresses of earth and shadow. Forms transfigured into memories or omens.

Danilo Maestosi, Il Messaggero, 1 May 2013

THE FOUR SEASONS

Nature is always the same but ... our art must render the thrill of her permanence... .It must give us a taste of her Eternity

Paul Cézanne

After having painted the series of cosmic elements - water, air, earth, fire - Lina faces the cycle of the seasons, capturing original relationships of shapes and colors, fed by a dynamic concept of reality, which interprets its infinite metamorphoses.

The life of nature becomes an opportunity to trace its secrets, grasp its essence, sublimate its appearances, with full awareness of its richness, of its perennial contrasts.

Guided by a historically "modern" sensitivity, the artist adopts with a virile air, without neglecting accents of subtle poetry, direct tones, which upset the typical languages ​​of Arcadia, eliminate any indulgence to a static poeticity, highlight strong elements of novelty , triggered on a robust creative attitude.

The eternal renewal of creation is grasped in a frank way, albeit careful to perceive its heartbeat, to draw an intimate and moving diary, which reflects the depth of consciousness.

Large chromatic units are integrated into complex expressive mechanisms, determination and courage animate a work that reflects, in an autonomous way, experiences of historical avant-gardes, from futurism to abstract art.

The eye investigates the details, hints through the flight form of the soul, rendered through the musicality of the brush movements. Through a refinement of sensitivity, the ability to make plastic, concrete, what might have appeared incorporeal, malleable, unrepresentable, emerges.

Musical suggestions, together with the echoes of the poets' voices, are certainly elements of stimulus in the enterprise of making the secret perfume of the world visual.

The twirl of a leaf, the arabesque of a branch that expands in the air, the flight of a bird that seems to be swallowed up in the blue, the harmony of a cloud on the profile of things, the nuances of the great whole of a universe in perennial transformation, they are grasped with tense observation, fused into the unity of true and ideal.

A complex registration penetrates the most secret fibres of creation: the Pan-like sense of life’s resurgence from the depths beats in Spring; the song of heights and depths vibrates in the sonorous colours of Summer; the secret sheen of a temperate beauty is Autumn’s testimony , while the symphony in dazzling white sends a series of images vibrating through Winter, transmitting a profound if contained emotion.

Fantasy flies and the sense of asceticism is the flight of the soul, an ideal wind seems to bear witness to the wave of life, the moving of the eternal womb of the world.

The song expands with loving exaltation, the gaze identifies a detail revealed to the depth of a prehensile eye in front of the majesty of the skies, of the horizons, of the unfathomable mystery of creation.

The natural elements constitute the point of contact between the idea and the real,

the idea generates the vision, what is external becomes the expression and reflection of an internal attitude.

Presentation in the catalog LINA PASSALACQUA - The Four Seasons

Gangemi International Editore, March 2013

Personal Exhibition Museo del Vittoriano from 18 April to 18 May 2013 Rome

CONVERSATION BETWEEN ENZO BENEDETTO AND LINA PASSALACQUA

In a meeting in the "Futurismo Oggi" studio, I attended and listened with interest, but without participating, to an "atypical" conversation between the editor of the magazine, Enzo Benedetto, and the painter Lina Passalacqua, who had with her a rich slide album. I have not neglected to take notes, from which I draw a series of jokes.

BENEDICT - From what you tell me and I see in this series of slides, I understand that your research, having overcome the problems of professional maturation, allows you to express yourself at best with freedom. exponents of futurism breaking away from its previous strictly figurative commitment. Behind what instinct and, if it is possible to establish it, when did you decide in this current direction?

PASSALACQUA – I have to go back in time. When I was young, for example, Lorenzo Lotto was among my inspirations and it was because I wanted to study his artworks that I decided to accept teaching painting in Jesi, in Marche Region. I detest amateurism and the slapdash attitude that are sovereign nowadays and I prefer rigor. I was attracted by oil painting technique because of its magic qualities and I was always interested in good painting of any historical period, such as Impressionism, Divisionism and the Avant-Gardes, until I understood that the most interesting one was the Futurist one.

BENEDICT - To be clearer, don't you think that the so-called "avant-garde" only finds in Futurism the strength and awareness of being "such"? However, which painters impressed you the most?

PASSALACQUA – First of all Picasso, because of his idea of space with different points of view that allow the overlap of many views from different angles; his intention was to represent the objects the way they are in reality and not the way they appear. He was the first artist who rejected the Renaissance concept of space, a rupture that broke five hundred years of history. The futurists used this liberated space but they added motion to it, basically our times. I also learned a lot from Férnand Léger, especially the idea of the object enlargement that becomes subject of the painting. I liked Kandinsky’s pure abstractionism less. Moreover, I liked futurist artists: first of all Boccioni, then Balla, Depero, etc.

BENEDICT - I do not agree on the hypothesis that the futurists have added something to the space freed by Picasso. The futurists, without prejudice to Picasso's particular merits, start from the concept of artevita, the driving idea - again in our opinion - of all activities, and their thinking is upstream of art and technical problems, but conditions them in all fields of activity. But why was he the first to mention Boccioni among the Futurists?

PASSALACQUA – In Boccioni’s paintings there is a moving energy that reflects our times. The artwork Città che sale is characterized by a chaotic violence of cosmic energies, and reality is rendered like a dynamic continuum removing the differences of time and space. On my canvases I have tried to convey those forces that intersect and represent the basis of his works. Moreover, there might also be an instinctive attachment to an artist who comes from my own land. I was also born in Calabria, in Sant’Eufemia d’Aspromonte, and I think it is quite sad that the picture gallery of Reggio Calabria does not have one of his artworks.

BENEDICT - I find your attachment to Boccioni so appreciable. I myself, since 1924 and on many occasions and in various administrations, have asked, without success, that a reproduction of his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space appears in a square (or in the Museum) without being able to get a hearing for this desire, However, all of Boccioni's work is fundamental and has been illustrating the new times ever since. From plastic dynamism that highlights motion as an expression of vitality, to states of mind that express dynamisms of feelings and ideas.


PASSALACQUA - In Balla, the real is analyzed almost as a cinematic sequence and the dynamism is represented as a repetition of elements that move in space; in Boccioni, on the other hand, it is action, motion that creates new plastic forms in space. Boccioni as it has been said - is the

BENEDETTO – How do you think you are related to these futurists? And which are the differences between the previous futurists and the futurist Artists of today?

PASSALACQUA - I'm interested in the continuous spirit of renewal and the search for the new. As a personal contribution, I insert this matter - which is also energy - of the ephemeral everyday life of the modern world into my dynamic: flash.

BENEDETTO – What do you mean by flash in painting?

PASSALACQUA - The flash is the instant. Our whole life today is struck by images for a moment, whether we look from the train or car window, or in the alternation of television channels and advertising spots, in newspaper kiosks, in illuminated signs, in the headlights of machines that flash and disappear… We live in the age of the flash and everything appears fragmented. Our feelings also suffer from this characteristic. I am impressed by the flashes of our time, by the "splinters" of life that strike us continuously. I live in a society made of flashes, which risks losing its historical and perhaps even moral memory.

BENEDETTO – I do agree to the extent that one should not lose the overview given by small details (in space and in time), otherwise everything breaks apart and crumbles like what happens after an explosion.
Why do you put also human figures in your more recent paintings, in your flashes? Don’t you think that the figure could disturb the chromatic equilibrium of the abstract ensemble of forms and of the palette and be, therefore, a dangerous distraction?

PASSALACQUA - No, if you watch TV, for example, they are always present together: we find ourselves in front of and faces and things in geometric spaces. My attempt to merge the two elements is also justified by the sensations I experience every day. It is the details, the detail that becomes the subject of the painting. In some paintings I have also tried to include fragments of the past, in particular in the painting entitled Schegge di memoria, where the reds of Pontormo mix with the cuts of a futurist space. And here is also a tribute that I intended to pay to the masters of the Renaissance. If today I have to recover the “historical memory” I cannot do it by evoking a myth, which in my opinion would no longer make sense, but by reworking fragments of images from the past that have struck me, inserting them in a modern space.

BENEDETTO – I do understand your recalling of the past, nevertheless I did not manage to see your artworks live and then it is more difficult for me to talk about them.

PASSALACQUA - In my last painting, The scooter, the flash captures a fragment of a motorcycle, a helmet and a human arm. The same can be said of the painting Finish line where the waving of a flag merges with the canopy of a racing car. And here, beyond the lesson of Léger or the futurists, that of pop-art also emerges.

BENEDICT - I understand, and I send you my best wishes for your work which finds justification and purpose in your own thoughts. But don't take away the pleasure of exhorting you to look at the other "greats" with detachment. You always try to follow the dominant instinct.

.

Presentation in the catalog LINA PASSALACQUA - Fragments in time and space

Typography Ugo Detti 1989 Rome

Anthological Exhibition of Municipal Museums - Church of San Paolo from 8 to 27 April 1989 Macerata

Cosmic dynamism 

Lina Passalacqua is a painter who works in thematic series. Their chronological succession, approximately one every decade, marks the rhythm of her artistic explorations. The present Roman exhibition, in the prestigious setting of the Vittoriano, familiar to Passalacqua, and the catalogue accompanying it, pursue a twofold objective: firstly that of documenting the most recent series, Fables and Legends and, at the same time, retracting, even only summarily, the whole of her career, spanning a period of almost sixty years, to present a true and proper anthological review.

In reality, my brief opening remarks require a few clarifications, which I consider important to a proper look at the career of this Calabrian artist, residing in Rome for decades. Beginning with the very definition of the painter, no longer as effective as it once was, but which instead tends to speak of a true and proper adoption of a position. Today, as everyone knows, there is a widespread disaffection with painting. There are those who consider it a language that has been worn out and rendered banal by too much and too many years of use; a language that has already seen and said all it has to. Lina Passalacqua, instead, remains unshakably bound to the reasons and practices of painting. All the same, this has not kept her, over time, from approaching different materials and techniques, such as bas-reliefs in wood and paper collage, the latter above all as studies for much larger works in oil.

Also the option to organize his work on a ten-year basis, if from a certain point of view it may risk appearing conventional and forced, because then, with regard to the activity of an artist, a time span is equivalent to another, always, of course, that there are no epochal political and cultural upheavals to mark and modify with arrogance the course of history. This choice - I was saying - appears supported by an arcane ordering capacity, as Giorgio Di Genova effectively claimed with his History of Italian Art of the 900s, structured on the basis of precisely ten-year generations (and Passalacqua is deservedly included in it, as it was in the most relevant exhibition concerning the Thirties generation).

Another preliminary, but fundamental, consideration concerns the relationship of Passalacqua with the abstractive language. Now it is undeniable that among the paintings of Fairy tales and legends, but above all, in the gods cycles Flights and Vele, of apparently aniconic outcomes - of an abstractionism, however, lyrical and non-rational, as Maria Teresa Benedetti had occasion to point out - in which the figural presence is reduced to a minimum, there are many. Yet I believe that Passalacqua's painting remains, even in these cases, of a peremptorily figural instance, to such an extent that the concretistic motivations are less than the drives of the true phenomenal, that our artist's painting besieges with an urgent need that cannot be avoided.

The motif abstraction involves another, also of primary importance to the comprehension of this Calabrian painter’s work, in other words the ties with Futurism. Ties that were both numerous and intense (in opposition to the accredited historical-critical opinions of the time, that is the XNUMXs and ‘XNUMXs, which now appear inexplicably reductive) since the debut of a very young Passalacqua, who never hesitated to recognize Marinetti’s movement as one of the fundamental aesthetic trends of the past century, adhering to the watch-world of Futurism: Dynamism. While her initial point of reference was the vastly talented Giacomo Balla (one of Passalacqua’s earliest paintings was entitled Homage to Balla), Passalacqua was offered the occasion to develop strong ties with other historic Calabrian futurists, such as Antonio Marasco and, in particular, Enzo Benedetto. This latter, beyond his own work as an artist, was in fact the principal theorist, though the journal Futurismo oggi, of an operative and not only museal continuity the vital legacy of Marinetti’s movement, even after its founder’s death on XNUMX December XNUMX. This event spontaneously introduced a question of great import, of reflection or, perhaps, one could say, of cultural metabolism, which also involved Passalacqua, conspicuously represented in the permanent exhibition of Calabrian futurists in Cosenza (an group that, by right of birth, includes non other than Umberto Boccioni) where, evidently, the controversy was evidently and undoubtedly been resolved in a positive manner.

Thus we find ourselves with the latest series of works by Lina Passalacqua, still on-going and being shown for the first time: Fairy Tales and Legends, approximately twenty paintings created and completed over the past three years. It is impossible not to experience a sense of wonder at the freshness, the strength, the inventive freedom of this late though incredibly vital period, which embraces some of the most convincing results from Passalacqua’s lengthy career.

As the title attests, her inspiration derives from the fullest affirmation of the world of fantasy. Themes and figures are often provided by absolute absolute masterpieces of universal literature. Texts that only an intellectual approximation has sought to set aside by classifying them as children’s books, and thus of minor importance. While on the contrary they entirely merit the intelligent writings on the fable of Cristina Campo in the cult book Il flauto e il tappeto, now accompanied by Lina Passalacqua’s visual interpretation.

The lead soldier, the adventures of Alice, Pinocchio, Aladdin,Peter Pan; isThe fire bird, The enchanted forest,the blue birdand so on; or the poetic Arab legend that narrates the formation of the desert, introduce us to the enchanted world of fairy tales that does not end in easy recreation or even in the discomfort of the present, but opens up access to an arcane and deeper wisdom dimension. After all, there are also, to define the complex reality of fairy tales and legends, ancient and modern - presences such as Malefica e Mirror of my cravings, less positive and discounted. It is no coincidence that, in their regard, Passalacqua evokes the image of the mask, ready to conceal the features of the face, to give life to a continuous alternation of truth and fiction. You are amazed observing, with the necessary attention, the energy enclosed in these paintings, for which the reference to the Futurist legacy is even peremptory (more calm is the trend of the Arab legend).

The choice to accompany a finished oil painting with its relative preparatory sketch is both intelligent and highly successful. This collage of coloured paper includes photographs from illustrated magazines, reduced where necessary to thin strips and used like an ideal palette and numerous brushstrokes. I also consider the phantasmagorical sketches to be works of art in their own right, as complete and with the same aesthetic dignity as the oil paintings. They are presented as effective interpreters of the charge of energy unleashed by Passalacqua, who works in a futuristically diagonal direction to accentuate the effect of movement. What is more, this energy is confirmed by pressing chromatic rhythms and a vivacity of colour: we can observe, for example, how fruitfully Passalacqua has interpreted Stravinsky’s incandescent idea of the Firebird.

An analogous discussion can be made of the other series – technically, though certainly not thematically analogous – such as The Four Seasons, and fruit of more than thirty years of work. In particular, in a context of widespread ecological sensitivity, The Four Seasons are dedicated to the world of flora and fauna. In fact, flowers present the most involving lineaments of the cyclical and annual succession of the seasons, of biological and psychic rhytms: a flower, as we know, is little more than a miniscule fragment of reality, fragile and ephemeral, and yet microcosm reflects the macrocosm. Anything can happen.

Look, for example, at Freesias in bloom, and the tender green of the plant, which Passalacqua has chosen as the announcement of the rebirth of life after the great winter hibernation. It is certainly not without significance that the splendor of a flower - in front of which, the Gospel assures us, Solomon with all his wisdom and wealth, could never wear a more elegant dress - constitutes a free gift, entirely useless, wasted, to a merely functionalistic look. I think it is not risky to propose a reading with a cosmological flavor of Lina Passalacqua's painting, just mention the series of Flights, all focused on the elements, not those of Mendeleev's periodic system, as much as the protagonists of traditional cosmologies: earth, air, water and fire . But I would also like to involve in the speech "The sails", an allegorical theme as many as ever, in whose folds the sound of the sea is perceived: inflating the sails is a synonym of the departure, the start of the human adventure, of the Argonauts who aim daredevils beyond the columns of Hercules, beyond lands and seas then known. Just these symbolic associations, and other similar mythical values, it seemed right to evoke the attention of the observer, presenting in 1999 the exhibition of the "Sails", set up in the crypt of the statues of the Siena cathedral.

However , as I have already had occasion to mention, the series from the most recent thirty years of Passalacqua’s activity are far from marking the end of her lengthy and intense work as a painter, as this exhibition justly recalls: there is the happy Pop period of the XNUMXs and ‘XNUMXs; the numerically limited, though profoundly felt production of Sacred Art (the word masterpiece comes to mind when speaking of the XNUMX oil painting The Word Became Flesh: Fillia would undoubtedly have included it in an ideal repertory of Sacred Futurist Art). There are also the more traditional examples from the XNUMXs, that reflect (even in a documentary manner, in images of the studio) the important apprenticeship with the painter and engraver Carlo Alberto Petrucci. Above all, as a minimum we must recall the persistent and most authentic matrix of Passalacqua’s early and late work: drawing. Portraits, more or less elaborate sketches, concepts for future paintings: the laborious matitatoio, mentioned by the ancients, reconfirms the reasons of painting and the solidity in the Passalacqua’s work at a time when the gimmick and paronomasia appear to have taken the upper hand.

Presentation in the catalog LINA PASSALACQUA - Cosmic Dynamism

Gangemi International Editore, December 2017

Anthological Exhibition Museo del Vittoriano from 14/12/2017 to 14/01/2018 Rome 

Lina Passalacqua: DYNAMISM VISUALIZED

14 April 1989

Originally from Calabria, but residing in Rome since XNUMX (where now she holdes a professorship of figure drawn in the art school of via Ripetta), Lina Passalacqua officially arrived at painting, her primary and unconditional passion, in the early XNUMXs. She made theater, and with considerable success, working for the Piccolo Teatro of Bolzano and the Stabile of Catania, in leading roles, alongside Memo Benassi, Annibale Ninchi, Turi Ferro, Umberto Spadaro and other famous actors. But it’s the art of image as Valery puts it, vice impuni, which stubbornly grows and dominates over everything.

After all, there have been the fruits of this extraordinary love and certainly of prestige. Mario Verdone underlined it in the clear and fine introduction to her personal exhibition. He, as an expert on the recognized authority of Futurism, did not fail to recall the legitimacy of certain ancestry: for example of Boccioni, Balla, and even more of Depero. But we would immediately wrong the very good artist, if we did not declare the authentic vitalism - an a priori that turns out to be a fabric of conscience - of her appearance.

And then, it doesn't matter that you can recognize in Restlessness or Fragments in space a genetic congeniality with the highest Futuristic season, or in the splendid oil Splinters of memory that "plastic synthesis of things or facts perceived directly by the eye and transposed by the spirit ”that Maillard identifies in the pictorial architecture of Léger. It is even less important that in certain paintings, both geometric and interpenetrated in cadences of "simultaneity", there may be some suggestion of constructivists (or suprematists) such as Tatlin, Malevic or Lissizkij, or Rodchenko's "Non-objectivism" in positive collusion with rhythms, improperly called neoplastic, by Mondrian and Van Doesburg: here, in Lina Passalacqua, cultural projection is beautifully verified by a temperament that does not admit dogmatism of any kind.

Upstream of the colorful warping, completely abstract or still linked to a realistic allusiveness, speculatively designed as Liberation from a non-vital situation, or musically visionary as The moon peeps through the woods of Cesano, there is always the radical logic of the 'emotion. How not to feel that Lina Passalacqua is vocated and involved without reservations?

Her strength and energy are harmonious, avoiding all conflict between the philological meticulacy of an autonomous language and the irrational clash of inner pulsations. The elements of composition, lucidly reinvented on the presupposition of a reciprocal space-form, score light relationship, reveal a dialectical aspect which embraces and exalts a dual motivation of cerebrality and spirit if read outside the ascetic box of pure visibilit, a dialectical ferment that summarizes and enhances motivations of thought and soul. The basic sensitivity has never allowed Lina Passalacqua to operate cold, even if with aristocratic finiteness, among the thousand theorems of cultism: its substantial identity is, in definite, in the “dynamic truth”, in the hypothesis of a thought that expands from the usury of the norm listening the tumult of the heart.

This life has allowed the artist to nurture his aesthetic maturation from within, excluding, thanks to a firm election, the risk of standardize ideas and impulses. Of course, it is recognized that the direct consequence of the renunciation of what is easy, accommodated or provisional gratifying can only be the unease. Lina Passalacqua catches, by virtue of this bitter privilege, the evidence of the ephemeral that characterizes the contemporary street: "We live in the age of flash - she says during an interview with Enzo Benedetto - and everything appears fragmentary ... I am impressed by the flashes, by the shards of life that strike us continuously. I live in a society made of flash, which risks losing historical memory, and perhaps even moral memory ”.

Perhaps it is for the recovery of a spirituality that remains vigilant in spite of the distracted and meteoric web of occasions that we find, in many acrylics and oils of Passalacqua, some late-Renaissance insert in harmonious coexistence with an innovative vision. But it is not at all the gestuality of language, but ethical energy, that is, a compendium of balance and sentimental wealth.

A type of painting, then, (you could, of course, add bas-reliefs in Swiss pine or Russian pine) not for those unfamiliar with the languages of modern art, although its vigorously psycho-intellectual roots will be immediately clear to all – as will the fact that Lina Passalacqua is a significant presence on the contemporary scene.

from the book Twentieth century artists in Rome, pp. 275-276-277

Rendina Editori, September 2003, Rome

September 1987

These works by Lina Passalacqua, pastels and mixed techniques where even the episodic insert of the collage obeys an internal logic of the structure, thus escaping the captivating complacency, are undoubtedly born in the sign of culture. But it must be said immediately that their refinement, both instinctive and of choice, is never humiliated by a philology of the image as an end in itself: there is so much delicate vibrating of colloquial motivations, even in the persistence of metaphor and of allegorizing analogy, there is so much pathetic flow under the generous harvest of forms, so much warmth of warnings, behind the dazzling escapes from phenomenal illusory, that the landing of art is fully enabled for a choral and permanent relationship.
Hence the aristocracy of evidence that nothing entrusts to casual chances should not deceive ; the calibrated plot of the drawing; the filtering of chromatic colours; the recurrence of a detail enucleated from the mobile counterpoint – the anxious hand of “Fermati qualche volta – stop some time”; the supine face of the “Risveglio di Eva – Eva’s awakening”, a machine, an eye open wide; the big mouth symbolizing the advertisement – or a drowing of a certain elegance, but here and there approaching anamorphosis.
Everything gives credit to the existence of a thought which reckons both with the history and the highest fortunes altogether with the humanism; Lina Passalacqua’s works, however, are a tribute to persisting love , to rigorous moral conscience, not at all misted by the idols of consumism often assuming the ardour of a public charge. Then, the professional emancipation, which shall be easily individuated by the attentive observer, flows into a total autonomy of the language, even if it is logically coordinated to some exemplary models of the modern figuration.
Shall we involve into question the revolutionary season of the first Futurism as privileged ancestor, due to a certain dynamic expansion of the line? Or, in terms of evocative hypothesis, shall we involve into question the“orphic phrasing” enunciated by Apollinaire for Delaunay’s paintings due to the simultaneous blooming of the colour? Or, again, Tatlin’s constructivism or even Rodochenko’s non-objectivism when the distance from the external connotation is emphasized by a geometrical creativeness? Nevertheless, we shouldn’t forget that Lina Passalacqua abstracts (and does it even when the reference to nature is openly repetitive and memorial) only to unveil the non-precious consistencies, behind the fluency of epiphanic appearance, escaping from the temporariness and the uproars of events; or, at least, to leave uncorrupted the existential doubt, in the superior purity of the gnosological anxiety.
Her aesthetical operation, therefore, is entirely promoted in her own name, and it is never affected by subjective correlations. Agreeded that, and as it happens in the highest levels of merit, of course, there is an atmosphere of congeniality which could be conform, for instance and more or less voluntary, to debatable culture parameters, to some technical solutions of cubism or, more specifically, to those “techno-spiritual” solutions of the Vorticism movement of the British artist Whindham Lewis.
But the fact is that these drawings-paintings of Lina Passalacqua are entirely enjoyable as a gift of grace and force; as active eloquence , that involves history and universality. Meanwhile, I would like to point out that the “good job”, set aside with a lot of ease, has produced miracles even at unsuspected latitudes: it makes sense because the paths of lyrical emotions find the support of a trained syntax. It doesn’t mean that the “intention” of a linguistically elaborated architecture plays a bad role to the genuineness and immediacy of the original feeling. As a good artist, she is more and more appreciated by those who are proficient judges, she works with an artisanal scruple, a kind of old times nobility which has been thrown away nowadays, but she mainly works with a full mind, this is a condition that is saving her from the “dead water” of the so-called experimentalism. Let’s try not to fall in the same misunderstanding run into by the good Giordani, who mistook Boccaccio expressive “richness” for “preciousness”.
Here, in Passalacqua's work, everything is harmony, distributive wisdom, poetic breath. The range that is innervated or dissolved leads back to the same mediation that is not aseptic, but rather involves and lavishes lasting resonances. The arabesque and the volume, the idea and the passion concur, in parallel, to explore the mystery of living.

Presentation in the catalog PASSALACQUA - Variations on the method - works on paper

Personal Exhibition Casa d'Arte La Gradiva from 6 to 16 September 1987 Montecatini Terme (PT)

[Lina Passalacqua] tends towards a choppy geometry of forms which, after a serious flirtrations with quasi-aniconic compositions with decidedly Futurist overtones, inevitably inviting the term Cubofuturist (Bosco, XNUMX; Tribute to Balla, XNUMX) began to bring a greater objectivization to her compositional elements (Fragments, XNUMX; Mechanisms, n.d.). Her paintigs (...) frequently favour a morphological bent, which can vary from a centripetal organization of the elements (The Money-Box is Closed, XNUMX) to the pictorial collage (Sudden Glance, XNUMX), or the visual mutterings of chromatic languages (The Word became flesh, XNUMX) to the very direct exemplification of Embrione, XNUMX, right down to the light-filled atmospheric volutes of (Towards Freedom, XNUMX; In the Cosmos, XNUMX).

If the need for clarity often makes Passalacqua to prefer the kaleidoscopic layout, when the memory or emotion becomes more intense, the structural layout of the scenes is enriched both spatially (The moon peeps through the woods, XNUMX; Flight of Swallows, XNUMX; Fragments in Space, XNUMX) and morphologically (Snippets of Memory, XNUMX; Self-Portrait, XNUMX). The most defined image sometimes appears in filigree (Melee, XNUMX) and sometimes it introduces itself or peeps out among the compositional breaks (In the beginning was the Great Goddess ?, XNUMX; Silver Wedding, XNUMX, Transformation, XNUMX; Shards of memory, Sudden Glance, XNUMX, Self-portrait, XNUMX) when it does not accede to the scene, as it is in the female figure with open arms that jumps in Freed from the shackles: exist, XNUMX, to reaffirm a focus on the veristic iconism, to which, at various times, she dedicates to mixed techniques on paper and in charcoal and colored pencils portraits

da History of Italian Art of the '900 - Generation of the Thirties, p. 563-564

Edizioni Bora snc, Bologna, December 2000