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