maddalena granziera

The residency’s project is dedicated to a geographical survey of the area between the provinces of Como and Lecco. The main piece is a canvas map in 1: 25.000 scale in which are reported, through oil painting, the two branches of Lake Como and the lakes of Montòrfano, Alserio, Segrino Pusiano and Annone. Through the use of photo transfer technique, Granziera shows on the canvas some photographic details of the places visited during the first phase of exploration. The evanescent effect of the pictures and the pink colour of the water contribute to generating an "abstract map" far from a didactic representation of the territory, in which each element becomes part of a great imaginary drawing. The scale calculation and the original photographs (which on the canvas lose definition) are the only "objective" reference to reality. Starting from the techniques and methods of cartography and the study of the geographical conformation of a territory, the artist transforms the objective data into something imaginative, elusive, dreamlike, that measures itself with painting (a sensitive painting, attentive to the atmospheric perceptions, to the variables of real), with the abstract sign (a decisive, strong, secure sign), to free itself from the constraints of a single discipline and open up to an extraordinary contamination of different grammars, which leads to an indefinable, and therefore attractive original and interesting, expressive mode.

 

                                                                                                                          - Text curated by Simona Bartolena

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The labile photo-transfers on the canvas, the manipulated pictures and the imaginary paintings put the physical reality on an ideal and indefinable plan. Like the visual memories that lose their definition during the time, the images created are fragile and evanescent, and point out the intrinsic aspect of our perception and of the world itself: transient, changeable, ephemeral. The same transience also characterizes the experience of walking and therefore the territorial exploration taken by the artist.