Alba Alata

The landscapes hidden in the mist and the fragments of rock are the eyes in which the soul of the artist dives and sees itself reflected upside down.

With this new solo exhibition, Alba Alata (Winged Sunrise), the author expresses at her best of her sensitive vision of the landscape as a reverberation of the soul.

Original, aerial and extremely delicate, Costanza Gastaldi’s new artworks surprise in their diversity, as they reveal new forms of her creative sensibility and offer an intimate and personal vision of what can be defined as “the landscape of the mind”.

The viewer is captured by the illusory space of the universe that appears from afar, in an indefinite territory, wrapped in a sea of clouds.

The absence of any human figure conveys a dreamlike dimension to the created landscapes, thus transforming them into chemical and chromatic imprints of the existence.

If it is true that the artist’s recurring themes – wandering, melancholy, loss and search for one’s self – are once again at the centre of her work, from a technical point of view Alba Alata differs in many aspects.

The dark and dense colours of “black lotus” (penultimate series) give way to a greater lightness, this time transforming the author into a watercolourist. The slightly blue hues of Chinese dawn are thus fading into the sweetness of pale greys. The manual colouring of the image in pastel tones creates a pictorial fiction that allows the viewer to find himself in almost surreal proximity to the landscape.

Subtle playing with depth, around the natural landscape, is made possible thanks to the use of special paper obtained from a mixture of old fibre from ancient papers (dating back to around 1800). The cream shades, typical of the series, highlight the intensity and intimacy of a real presence in a dreamlike space.

The images – touching due to their formal richness – their narrative dimension and their meticulous sense of detail, are the result of an important research work on matter and emotions.

In an age when enchantment seems increasingly rare and imagination is hindered by reality, Alba Alata reminds us how important it is to be attentive to the unexpected, and to beauty.

VITALI
Art curator and writer