The dream of art

From catalogue 2002 mostra Museum und galerie Im Prediger e-Kloster der Franziskanerinnen Schwabisch Gmund und Kulturzentrum Englische Kirhe-galeri Scheffel, Bad Homburg v.d.Hohe “MariaLuisa Tadei Soglia Ubergang Threshold” 2002 ISBN 3-9807297-4-5.

MariaLuisa Tadei has chosen to dream a dream of art which crosses many lands, unwinding through rows of images and solar shapes, made of fragments and sudden flashes, constant recurrences, moving away and plunging into a place that seems to belong to everyone: the magic land is illuminated by an inner gaze which shines with its own light, strengthened by an eye that is able both to look and to look at itself.

Tadei’s dream is scattered and strewn with fragments that exist at the crossroads of many skies, orbiting at different heights. The fragments are always slender, never bulky, their lightness allowing them to wander swiftly and rest calmly without causing clutter or imbalance. The sculptures contain no hollows, no haste. The elements are arranged according to the precepts of co-existence and epiphany, according to a sense of illumination and sudden appearance, as in the work „Tra l’una e le sette“ („Between One and Seven“).

The image is the result of a range of signs scattered outside any idea of a fixed route and all ready to return inside themselves, and dream of their indefinable tenuousness. The dream is not made of still, peremptory images but filaments of images ready to shatter at the crossroads of many routes. It is made to be looked at with an inner eye, in the fluidity of its signs, which at the same time are lasting and rooted in the history of dreams that dazzle and have dazzled the millenary history of man and the earth.

The shapes have their origin in the dream of the picture, sculpture or photograph, cut out in the frame whose edges are the edges of the painting, and then the edges of the dream itself. The developing language of art gives rise to flowers and deserts as well. It reproduces itself and inundates the surface of the painting with careful disorder. The care derives from a biological discipline of language, which is arranged according to relationships of erotic instantaneousness reproducing the organs of the artist’s body as if in a „+“.

The colours are also arranged openly or within the filaments of the images or else outside, distracting the shapes, forming links which fall away in echoes that fade away in the distance. Sometimes they explode nearby with a clash that remains silent, because it strikes the eye, albeit the inner eye. From here it flows quickly into the other organs of perception, which are never visual alone. The images thus return to their point of departure, in the dark or totally luminous recesses of the unconscious.

Tadei’s unconscious is not, of course, the home of the irrational, the pure underestimation of reason, but a repository which always finds new sap and renewal from its own compulsion to remain underground. A horizontal repository which does not like to raise its head, which has an aptitude for sloping movement. The dream of art is what brings it out of its reclining position, dragging it to the place of enactment where it does not suffer loss but in fact increases with further dark splendour.

„Working discipline to draw nearer to form“ (Mirò). The painter’s statement springs from the very nature of language, which likes to be looked at in a polite and contrite way. Contrition does not mean a loss of intensity, but growth and deeper concentration. In Tadei the dream of art passes through and overcomes improvisation, a refining of the image which measures its own appearance in a way that does not emerge hurriedly from the repository that has, so far, contained it. Entertaining the image is the only possible way to keep it from interruption. The artist has the gift of not dispo-ssessing the image of its density and interior links.

MariaLuisa Tadei never produces lacerations; shapes and figures maintain deep roots which embed them in the substance of the imaginary. The imaginary is not an abstract place, the abstract condition of fantasy but the uninterrupted terminal of the repository of the unconscious. The language forms the mechanism through which it starts up and produces its pollution.

Vibration is the movement the artist develops to draw near to the inner place. Nature is not far from this place, in fact nature exists in unison, on the same wavelength, made of expansion and contraction, slender tremors which prevent great events but form the temporal and therefore invisible extremes, within which the small events of birth and death take place.

The simultaneous nature of the image is not therefore the result of speed but of patient measuring aiming not to deprive it of its initial intensity. The intensity is the temperature measuring the reality of the image, its static unchangingness within the grid of language.

A slow, patient struggle begins between the artist and her tools, and at stake is the prevention of loss that may derive from the excessively agitated use of Tadei’s language; she is aware that language has a profound structure and that the unconscious is structured like the language, with links and passages. So the artist, like an acrobat, walks slowly on the high wire, attempting to cross over a narrow place where it is possible to fall, but from where it is possible to look down on the world like an „oculus dei“. The artist has preserved enough roots to remain firmly anchored to the vibration which sustains nature and also the dream of art. Here geometry and systematic signs interweave incessantly and establish a harmony of appearances which preserve, both inside and out, the intense phantom of the whole. The whole is the circularity of everything and also the struggle to hold back the initial vibration within the confines of a language that produces a double meaning: the upward meaning of completeness and the unlimited or downwards meaning of the infinite, which can only be guessed at by looking: circle, cross and eye are its symbols. The dream of art in Tadei seems to run along other heights, flight levels that do not keep their distance from the ground but seem to follow paths at the opaque ground level. Shelves, then, with neat substance, the traces of memories of objects, the graffiti hinting at solitary dialogue with the wall. The surface is a wall, a horizon that runs still and unmoving to obstruct our gaze. Here the dream of art takes place through powerful signs that have the strength of penetration.

Now, in Tadei, everything becomes precarious and at the same time definitive, traced in the cemented substance of a surface that welcomes and retains every sign in a lasting way. The dream of art has a long memory and is not lost behind the changing sequences of simple free association. Images remain enmeshed in the texture of a dense, certainly not noble material. Yet they all hasten to shelter on the surface of the wall, whence it is impossible to run far away.

Time and space find an irreversible placing, crossed and given to future memory by the ability of the surface to know how to be a wall against any instability. To leave a trace means to engrave, enter the material with a firm hand or come quickly up against the wall to mark one’s passing. Chance and decision, geometry and free forms, are placed in a fixed, frozen position, all images of a presence that finds no other affirmation outside these indirect memories.