Text by Flaminio Gualdoni
It's a kind of deep pleasure, and fortunately not a secret one, to be able to preside over the atelier's
life of Rosanna Forino. Hers life made of vivid, crisp lights, and a connection of clear sensuality
with the color's essence.
Forino has always chosen, for herself, for her pictorial haikus, the language of geometry, and of
primary shapes - not pure, not ideologically well-established, but essential. Shapes that are not
profiles, but the expression of concrete movements.
By resting on these two points we can correctly read her work, which has found of late a certain
souplesse, an ultimate fullness. They are primary shapes, because they do not arise from the dream
of a static perfection that many of the century's avant-garde artists had cultivated. Forino, as
Dimitrij Sarabianov pointed out, delves into natural sensation, a natural feeling that in our time has
come to identify in her soul the vital stream of a swelling sea, and the astonished mystery of a
bright essence alternating between the sea and the sky, and back, and again, like a value of the
other, of that which beyond ourselves allows us to think for ourselves.
So, not a natural motif, not an early feeling, but that which, from the vision and the emotional flow
received from the vision, decants itself in a penseur couleur, the conceptual and not just expressive
crossings on which she works.
Referring to this approach, filtered through long meditations, through experiments, and through
pictorial cycles lived, as Lalla Romano has remarked, with "calm sureness free from any vanity,
Forino has found, from historical abstraction, other original sources for her works. Not the
symbolism's giddiness, as alien to her work as the staging of closed shapes - of course the Klee's
abstraction with memories", and ardent Kandinskij's sense of fear, the eroticism sublimated in
strongly natural movements; the luce dentro (the light inside), of Matisse's light blue paintings, the
crisp physiological exchange of sinuosity in Onda (Wave), and Oceanie: a direct passage that's easy
to read in past performances, a smiling and light-hearted abstraction, with nothing but music
-without fire- , marvel once more at Luigi Veronesi, noble father of this painting.
Forino has chosen her own tradition, and a genealogy, this last obviously not to state some degree
of intellectual nobility.
It was necessary to try to understand which among the maggior sui showed the way towards going
beyond the natural, both free of the metaphysical and pitfalls of the bodily; a transcendence that
could enjoy the same estranged, radiant, abstraction of music: but Forino, as we clearly see, is a
passionate music lover.
All of this can explain why we say that the artist is wary of the essential actions of painting, when
giving life and form to an image.
Forino does not experience the painting as a linear process of technical routine. We can see that she
refuses to follow any sort of recipe book. If, as it is, her emotional flow is a musical one, her
painting too is a musical impromptu -with the same rules and freedom of the skilled and inspired
music composition, full of precise and ample expressions, with precise intonation and accents,
precise chords' relationships acute harmonic teleology. No wonder that Sergio Dangelo, an artist
with a light mind, and acute listener of others' works, indicates in a poetic text her "exact intervals",
and the "brilliant in red yellow orange green / colors of your dream's flag", musicality over
musicality.
Forino acts as a writer, she follows the rhythms of writing, with all the sorting out of the marks, of
all the shapes we can feel expressing the sphere of intimacy - a sphere we cannot master as
intellectuality. Such a suggestion of writing, a writing built of shapes and color, is amplified and
specified by Forino's recent predilection for a sort of upwards unrolling, which evoke the strong
expressiveness of standards, speak of the graphic writing of the Far East, of the parchment in which
image and writing are the same expression of thought.
Even this is a given tradition, not just accepted, but Forino's own tradition. It's a tradition founded
on a special feeling for the sign - signing as a primary act of identity-; able to take us back to the
confused origin and source of our ideas about writing and painting, about meaningful machina and
code. The code the artist has to unify is not an obvious one: she has to homogenize in a single field
of vision/reading the ciliate graphemes, the emotionally seismographic traces of the subtle black
and of the wide, perfectly measured range, of the colors.
The colors themselves, like wefts, resound with quite different vibrations, they present themselves,
above all, with different peculiarities.
They do not overlap, or collide, or clash, in the three-dimensional perception. The paper-like
flatness -or Matissian marquetry- of the canvas is achieved in a both inextricable and obviously
necessary way. Like the unfolding of those simple autonomous behaviors, that are visual yet other
than visual, at last they find a unity ad homogeneity as a tightly-knit and fluid fabric or web, of
relationships, exchanges, balances and harmonic escapades: not a theatre of emotions coagulated in
definite forms, but a passionate flowing, able to write itself at the same time as we can perceive it.