Serena Vestrucci
Skies, galaxies, nebulae and dense cloud banks. Among the best-known cycles by Serena Vestrucci - a versatile artist who arrives at painting only by tangency and with a conceptual approach - is that of make-up on fabric or canvas. Neither oils, nor acrylics, nor spatulas or brushes. The artist uses only her hands and as a raw material she chooses something unusual: piles of cosmetics, stolen directly from the female ritual of make-up.
Dose and mix, digging your fingers into the volatile powders, for a slow artificial mix. It is the artifice of a non-painting painting, which lets its ambiguity slide onto the canvas; and it is the artifice of a sky that is not sky: just an evocation, a perceptive illusion, in the absence of any illustrative intention; finally, the artifice of a canvas that is literally "made up". Rouged.
Vestrucci immediately plays with the anomalous shift: from the level of her face we move to the level of the artistic gesture. “For me it is important to use color so that it is functional at work, not for a decorative or compositional issue. [...] When I make up the canvas I do nothing but act like anyone who uses eyeshadows on the eyelids, I simply move the field of action”. And here the canvas, no longer a discrete support for the image, becomes the subject to make up, to camouflage, to embellish. True protagonist, together with the (popular) identity of the materials. The story proceeds along these two tracks and discloses nothing else. Not a sky to imitate, not a painting to celebrate. Right of make-up, passing from the body to the painting, on the edge of deception.
