Resins and paper
WORKS
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TESTI di: Roberto Gramiccia e di Giorgio Bonomi
 
IN-CROCI by Roberto Gramiccia - 2008

In-croci di senso. Adele Lotito is both a light and heavy artist. She is light in her gentle and effortless approach to her work, for her agreeableness, her quick walk and her sportive agility; for her chosen language and materials – the design, signs, candle smoke, the paper and aluminium, rarely, the colours, red being her favourite. For Hegel, red is the colour of colours and Adele uses it sparingly – only when necessary, when she wants to keep emotions under control. However, Lotito is also a heavy artist because she takes on, artistically, the burden of keeping the perspective of sense open, which is like saying we influence things by chance but also because of necessity (Monod). And it is that necessity we need to interpret – as she tries to do – if we don't want to sink into barbarism, abandoning ourselves to the course of natural events, governed by the most basic instincts and arrogant powers. Adele Lotito has become the poetic spokesperson for the need expressed by a logo-central mentality, that has become worn down by the continual blows of media deregulation and the boorish simplification of a single way of thinking. The original way this artist has in carving out fragments of reasoning from the chaos and expressing, on the undefinable and irregular surfaces of expanses of smoke, captured on aluminium or paper, treated with fixatives or resins, spaces for a possible meaning – letters of diverse idioms, numbers of today and yesterday (e.g. Roman numerals), brief words of past meanings. But more often, letters and numbers. Not signs and meanings, but rather significant elements from quavering edges and from a deliberately imperfect finish. These are fragments of a possible communication, that can be realized on a verbal, literary and mathematical level only by putting together the same letters and numbers correctly. This means keeping open the possibility of a meaning, a sense, without concealing the uncertainty of floating in a smoky sky of letters and numbers, free and tentative, open to every possible idea, sublime like the Magnificat or diabolical like Mein Kampf. I don't know if the intention of this Roman artist, representing a poetic turning point that is very new and refreshing in the biennial, is philosophical. But what is certain, is that her work is able to interweave the emerging of a formal seduction made up of an equilibrium and conceptual daring with the challenge of a reasoning that forces us to have doubts. Adele Lotito's works are beautiful to look at, but also to think about. They feed the eye and the mind. As in the best of Italian tradition. In-croci, the work presented in this Biennial, is particularly well conceived as it attains and sums up the story of doing and thinking. The two panels, separate, but enriched in meaning by their being near each other, draw together two alphabets which the world's terrorists would like to see one armed against the other. An Arab that emerges from a red surface giving himself an image of stately elegance. The Westerner that breaks up the surface of smoke showing a weave that is both abstract and not, because, in not reproducing reality, the presupposed is presented, being the elementary condition of language.
The Magnificat links the two works because it is praise to God, a link between the Old and the New Testaments and, in this case, also a link between the two
monotheistic religions that have looked for and found (finally) the possibility for dialogue.
Roberto Gramiccia