LINA PASSALACQUA, SOUL IN FLIGHT

18 February 2006

True art has never landed.
In it only audacious departures, sudden escapes, an inexhaustible journey, terrifying falls; and still patches of expectation, imperceptible motions, furious surges, as well as placid inertia, infinite slips, flights ... Flights, in fact, and it is Lina Passalacqua that I find and recognize, in her masterful pictorial knowledge, as extreme as the acme of a flight - never the last certain - and improper is the singular, since multiple and unstoppable, urgent and fearless, have always been his "FLIGHTS", in that enchanted disenchantment - and it is not a play on words - of the completely "upbeat ”Of a great artist that I love very much. Art critics generally do not expose themselves on a too personal level, they do not indulge in declarations of a private nature, perhaps detrimental to the golden coldness of the role, but I can, as a poor poet, afford it!
Yes, I love Lina Passalacqua, for her art and her life! My passion in writing burns and there too there is the joy of courtly perditions or the abyss of deadly thuds; also for this reason I was intrigued by the literally persuasive titles of the 38 works of LP, which flaunt a philosophical matrix, proposing a fil rouge that binds, as in a meditated gait, the "passages" in the four alchemical elements - Earth, Air, Water, Fire - which atavistically belong to the cosmic primeval Kaos which of Man is the principle, captivity and ineluctable seduction, understood, this, in the founding etymology.
The canvases of LP - whose own inescapable titles insinuate the need for scans, suggest the idea of ​​a "path" that is already flying - skip the feeble semantic network that of the word is strength and limit, and the cosmos is revealed - finally - in the eyes of the beholder. The backdrop of the scene is torn apart, the perspective opens up as in dreamlike visions and the physical and metaphorical gravity disappearing, the earth is really missing under the feet.
Not surprisingly, it was entitled "Nel cosmo" (1996 - cm. 180 × 180), a large oil on canvas presented, together with other oils and sketches, pastels and monotypes, at Studio S - Contemporary Art by Carmine Siniscalco during an enormously successful 1998 exhibition, “VELE”, with a text in the catalog by Carlo Fabrizio Carli. “The sails of LP repeat to us a song of freedom, a desire for light and wider horizons” - this is how Carli expresses himself; then defining "in the pictorial itinerary of LP that of the Vele a qualitative summit".
Those sails today are FLIGHTS! Still a play on words ... but in the vowels that are transformed, creating a different meaning, there is perhaps the highest sense of true art which is such when it succeeds, in semantic misunderstandings as in the most banal, almost childish transliteration, to compose and to represent that gap between man and artist, who alone - the latter - possesses the key to every artifice, the secret of even the slightest "slip" of the soul. Here then the "FLIGHTS" of LP ruffle the historical premise and promise of its splendid sails; and the easy consonance of the two words, which one instinctively spells out, almost extracted from an old syllabary, become an "image", overturning the obvious two horizontal planes of the human scenario. - Sky-sea, above-below -; the image is overturned and Lina - Ulysses - "behind her soul made a siren" - continues the journey, sailing started from the sea, of course, from that same sea overlooked by the house where Lina, as soon as she can, take refuge to work; from this blue and wet “incipit”, the moorings of the dream melt, to the point of forgetting the Mediterranean and the Pillars of Hercules and perhaps Ithaca itself.
Beyond destiny, which, as in the Odyssey, is the pivot of great literature and myth, which it flees or pursues; beyond earth and water, towards fire and air - load-bearing elements or just for conceptual LP scans -.
In any case, beyond and towards something, fearless or forgetful, dazzled or lucid, bewildered or bold. Lost or saved!
The immense charm of Art is its own "path":

“The earth is made of heaven.
Lying has no nest.
Nobody ever got lost.
Everything is truth and path "

I cannot help but think of my favorite verses by Fernando Pessoa, giant of Portuguese literature, poet - feigner of himself (it is his definition of the poet as such), in art as in life, and the distinction of the two terms is fictitious, all the more for Pessoa.
And extreme, unspeakable beauty is in poetry, as in all of art, the "power", with respect to the act; therefore the wait, not the outcome, the long perspective, the image to infinity, the Leopardian "shipwreck", as, in some Michelangelo sculpture, the tension of the gesture - in fieri - has the strength and the power to erupt from the stone that imprisons it, preventing its fulfillment.

"The arrow trembles because, in the broad quiver,
the present creates and includes the future.
If the seas rise their savage fury,
it is because future peace erases their footprint;

It all depends on what doesn't exist. "

It's Pessoa, again. Her verses echo to me, while the vivid memories of the LP's canvases haunt me from the first time I saw them, which she showed me, one by one, with the lively emotion of someone who confides a secret to you. One by one they dazzled me, the small and the large - a huge one (100 × 200 cm) - the result of five years of work, a fatigue, of the hand, of the eye and of thought, entrusted to the wise helm of an undisputed pictorial maturity , capable of declining color up to the spasm of the most unlikely shade - “the nuance counts, not the color”, in Beaudelaire's words -; incredible oils in the chromatic clashes that seem to escape the tyranny of an expressive will, escaping the very urgency of inspiration whose power is also evident.
Can - I still ask myself, like the day when I finally had before my eyes these canvases that, for some time, I had been waiting to see with impatience, like an announced epiphany - can the color be stronger, in the more meditated "reinterpretation" of a work, of the backgrounds that are its seal, of the brushstroke itself that expresses it? Is it a color that remains of our dreams? In front of the paintings of LP I think I have caught, at least for a moment, precisely in its fleeting colors, that mysterious something that of the soul is a "human" substance which, too, the Human transcends.
It seems difficult, yet it is not; are the corollaries of the thought that rethinks some canvases of LP, the invisible captions that accompany the unfolding of his works: from "Life among the leaves" - beginning of the journey (2002) to the "Finale" - and it is no coincidence that it is a tondo - "Lassù una stella" (2006), the last "eye" on the resurrection that is celebrated, as a ransom, after the penultimate, small canvas - again a round, recently completed - in which, among the black "brambles" of despair , the epilogue appears dramatically ineluctable! Coup de thêatre; everything starts again, the life that pulsates in every canvas returns to quiver; it is a quiver of wings, an aquatic flicker, an explosion of purple, crimson, mauve, of feathers, plumage of turtledoves, sparrows or, who knows, seagulls.
Happy or injured birds, kidnapped or rapacious, betrayed by what in aviation is called "euphoria of infinity", when you continue to swoop down, bewitched by the thrill of flight, regardless of the limits of the aircraft which, too close to the earth, he won't make it back up.

“Ah! The paths are all in me.
Any distance or direction, or term
it belongs to me, it's me. "

Pessoa's verses are, perhaps, the perfect counterpoint to LP's works, the answer to all questions; and if the poet is forced to use words, even a single image is enough for the painter, an icon of the said and the unspoken, a visualization of what no one will ever see.
The surprising and fleeting flights of LP project us into the absolute, beyond the 4 elements, ?????? of ancient philosophical speculations, the object of cabalistic fascinations. And suddenly disoriented we find ourselves in the fatal point, where everything ends, so that everything begins.
“I will fly like a seagull” (2004) is the only work in which you think, transpose, see, perhaps; they are the hair of a woman, the hint of a face, the one that can be glimpsed, floating, in the grazing glint of a flock. Here, in this single canvas, Lina exposes herself in the first person, in that unequivocal "fly" of the title.
A provocation, a challenge to tomorrow, the brazen affirmation of an artist ... to anyone who wonders how to interpret this ambitious assertion, I would like to say that that "future" is improper, it is out of place, it is the only "blindness" that to a artist can be ascribed: the unawareness of already being where the dream projects it. With his seagulls, LP has been "flying" for some time, in empirei skies, where the sidereal light refracts endlessly and dawn and sunset coexist without opposition; of Art is the lift on its wings, since only Art frees, transports, sustains, in eternal soaring, those who live in art, day after day. Until the luminous liberation, "flight after flight", from the dark ballast of being.

"MY SOUL IS WHAT IT DOES NOT HAVE" ...

... he is still the poet who "sings" the soul of which we all seek the mystery.
No one can say what, and where, it is and some doubt it exists; but in front of the LP FLIGHTS, I am sure: the soul flies!

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Presentation in the catalog LINA PASSALACQUA - Flights

Graficonsul group, April 2006