Touching Fairy Tales in Painting

There is a very lively, superabundant feeling for telling stories through images in these fervent works by Lara Bizzarri. Like a kind of hollow horror clothing the surfaces with reverberating, fabulous stories, her painting winds and rewinds, stretches out and curls up on itself in a glowing, chromatic concert of a thousand legends, a thousand inventions. One could call it a vagabond literature accumulating here, born of the burning imagination of a painter who certainly does not lack subjects of fantasy or the magical sense of things. This story-telling of hers, where she invents figures, situations, animals and places betwixt dream and fairy tale, has, over the years, built up an extraordinarily appropriate language, remarkably fresh and congruous, extremely personal and, above all, surprising. In a free and easy manner, Lara has sacked several pieces of past and recent art to form a mosaic of different stylistic elements and stimuli, re-inventions, findings and marginal quotations, of assimilations and dissimulations. She has done this with such supreme indifference, with such an enchanting impertinence, that one may see in them multiple likenesses (from Modigliani to Tamara de Lempicka, from the Byzantines to Art Nouveau and art bru, from German exponents of expressionism to the ironic games of Nicki de Saint Phalle). They are, in fact, more her own, sincere personal rediscoveries than authentic quotations - they are more an autonomous, unconscious cloning carried out through her unrestrained creativity.

In the dewy impasto of these thundering images, every element separately, every distinct trace of taste and style, every different tessera of expressiveness ends up with losing its original, individual connotations. She builds them up to define a unitary mass, a singularly coherent accent, a well-conducted and tempered whole which becomes more carefully philological, apart from any possible definition - a sole, sumptuous, uninterrupted fabric of tales and imagination. The structure of her discourse is that of an assemblage, of a stratigraphy of elements and minimal meanings, of close ups and long shots. Bodies and gestures are fused** or juxtaposed in the spectacle of life and dreams, in the exhibition of irony and sweetness, in a plot that very often appears discontinuous, a whirling obsession repeated over and over again. The harmony and movements of a more refined formal measure which, at first glance, seem far from Bizzarri's intentions, exist, on the contrary, as an intuitive stage in her stylistic conscience. They are the platform and, I would say, the unconscious atmosphere in which the sinuous jungle of her tales grows and multiplies. With their air of unity, they give rise to an original, sincere art which is not packaged faint-heartedly, to an art which, to some measure, is the same as that of the naïf poets. There is always depth and culture, but they are expressed with pure incongruence, with the urgency and vexation of primary declarations which are instinctive and passionate, just as a folk ballad singer would intone the ballads of his dreams. But, we must point out, here we also have a surrealistic side, or should I say? surreal daydreaming, in the sense that there would appear to be no refinement of the "classical" examples of this tendency (the Magrittes, Dalìs, etc). Rather, a form of imagination is developed by unusual associations, by surprising assemblages - a fresh, stunning accumulation of intuitions and instinctive, spontaneous ideas. I will repeat that what most struck me about her painting is her surprising language, her unpredictability, her singular, very personal expressive stress. In fact, this artist is an ardent fabricator of touching fairy tales of the absurd, the weaver of "primary magic spells", a creator of worldly dreams which ravel and unravel around a minute list soaked (as if by enchantment) in the memory and in reveries and, simultaneously, with subtle, precise evocation, in the conscience of the present. This evocation throbs away, intent on pursuing the most ambiguous hallmark of emotion and memory in her compositions and in their startling combinations.

Here we go again; surprise and ambiguity…. These could be the banks which define the stretch of water on which the rich imaginary of our painter navigates, her lyrical hallmark at times so markedly transfiguring. When the reality of our times, with its incongruence and contradictions, seems to us so sweet and cruel, so simple and, at the same time, so complex and unattainable, it is certainly true that one of the keys for an efficacious interpretation in handling it becomes, for those with lively souls, the very poetry, the poetic transfiguration. This transfiguration has a lyrical meaning able to drive itself forward in an authentic mood. It does this not without irony but with an amused sentiment of thought, the rough boundaries of "good" sense, beyond the suffocating limits of the amazing silly deeds we do every day. And it is precisely this we are dealing with - the inspirational lymph of images. A lyrical lymph which is traversed, however, by flashes of mordacity or touching divertissements of the mind and heart, forever suspended on the thread of her well-aired tendency to refer everything to her own life and thoughts, capable of allusion, of spinning yarns, of the most universal oneiric reference. These paintings of hers, from the more classical, composed ones to the more dynamic ones, crammed with apparitions and situations, always find a centre of gravity in recalling the joys of imaginary, the festive capacities and qualities possessed in everyone's fantasies. Thus, with gracious energy they widen our interior glance.

So it is that the eroticism I have just mentioned illuminates her young girls and brings us to the voluptuous ironic manner of her big, placid, humanised cats, who dance around as if in a kind of feline "Thousand and One Nights", all of them projected onto a screen which is represented by these canvases. A subtle, humorous lyricism ruffles them. So the observer, whether moved or intrigued, amused or scandalized by that mild flood of figures, realises that those figures disappear so as to allow the always unpredictable plot of harmonies and chromatic contrasts to speak of the rough and cloying, the arabesques and inlaying of hallmarks - the pure joy of painting.