Copyright © 2022 Valeria Scuteri - All Rights Reserved
KRITICA PAINTING
YEAR 2001 by Franco Fanelli
The exhibition, on paper, is already set that March evening: a wall dense as a mosaic, crowded with pastels and their vibrant pigments; opposite, the pulsation "normalizes," in fact its beats become rarefied, until reaching a hypnotic biorhythm: the large painting (it looks like marble dust, in that alabaster monumentality of the domestic "landscape" crossed by the reclining nude) is the filter zone, a screen that purifies and "defoliates" the images as it lets them pass through. If an exhibition must, as is customary today, harmonize aesthetic and educational needs, Valeria Scuteri's show dramatizes the contrast between the concretion of gestures and materials on the pastel wall and their purification on the drawing wall.
He tells me, in fact, that the starting point is the magma of the beginnings and that the arrival is the threadlike mark, which cuts like a laser through the yellowish paste of the dusting. I propose to him an analogy, in this path that reverses the classical order of the process of the work of art—from the "painting" to the drawing, and, in the case of Scuteri, from the physical "flesh" of the work to the immateriality of thought—with much of the outcomes of research developed in the second half of the twentieth century, aimed at the perception (and when possible the visualization) of the primacy of the artistic act. The "I know that I do not know (and for this reason, to find, I search)" of Scuteri translates into a sudden withdrawal from any possible placement of her work in any "trend": and she speaks of her real and ideal masters: Deabate, Devalle; Mantovani. Schiele. To reassure her, we tell her that drawing as a form and "mental" act is not a peculiarity of only the contemporary 20th century: that in this sign as a "forma mentis" there is room for a (synthetic) abstraction not only referable to that dissolution of narration as a mark of recognizability of Modernism. In fact, we mention to her Pisanello, the Comedy interpreted by Botticelli, even the stories told along the thread of the woodcut tablet in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. And then the angularity of certain German draperies, the hands, so eloquent, that from Durer's San Bartolomeo Altarpiece reach, through the uncompromising mark of the German burin manner, Pontormo.
We believe that the reference to some kind of narrativity might "convince" Valeria Scuteri, whose micro-stories, reassembled in symbolic and definitive gestures—albeit tied to a recognizable iteration of everyday life—take on the value of a metaphor for living and the pain of living, in short, of an existentiality centered on the synonym-antinomy man-male; with the constant presence of the feline, recomposing a more alluring and gentle iconography of Melancholy in light of the man-animal dialogue. Anatomies by memory, then, that become a recording of the memory of the present: drawing, in this sense, as a necessary daily practice on the dual front of preserving the "hand" and the daily capturing of a time that, necessarily, must then be summarized, like a truthful report, through the meaningful postures of the image. A present that other contemporary artists to Scuteri interpret in light of no less declared metaphors of femininity and unresolved issues (embroidery for Ghada Amer, Quranic writings for Shirin Neshat, the loom-machine-for-painting of Rosemarie Trockel). Valeria Scuteri's is an art of the present that can do without both the neo-monumentalism of installations and the photogenic quality of the artifact: for this reason we insist, whether she likes it or not, on a conceptual predominance (which is not conceptualistic) based on explicit narrative situations because they are elementary,
<<eternal>> because primary; sometimes painful because radical.
YEAR 1999 - VALERIA SCUTERI, Descriptions and Considerations by Pino Mantovani
Regarding the theme, let's start with an obvious fact: they are all male nude figures (I am referring to the works on display, large paintings on canvas, medium paintings on paper, drawings; without excluding that the artist may have worked on different subjects), that is, "nudes," a classic manifestation of aesthetic and moral beauty. That must mean something. Equally evident, in terms of style, is that Valeria Scuteri is first and foremost a confident and robust draughtswoman; as a painter, she can therefore move freely with material and color without the need to refine, force, or prove anything, using a term of humanistic origin, one might say with "sprezzatura," which is unstudied grace, a superior, concealed artifice.
By unifying the two data, or rather three – thematic clarity, construction confidence, mastery without ostentation – we could conclude that we are faced with a case, currently rather rare, of painting that is both rigorous and generous.
But immediately – this too is evident – we notice that the figures in question represent the nude either in a state of total abandonment, so much so as to evoke death or rather a “mortal” weariness (see the reclining posture, the loosening of the joints, the slipping of the limbs due to the loss of muscular and nervous control), or in a state of great agitation (see the upright posture, with the lower and especially upper limbs spread apart and the hands with fingers extended in an eloquent gesture of surprise and despair). One could also say, in summary: on the one hand, a body deprived of its vital tension (another sign, the collapse of the sexual monument), on the other, a body debilitated by excess tension; but always a body that manifests, in its classical proportions and articulations, an essential dignity, so to speak regained precisely where rational control gives way and the original “nakedness” returns.
One could note, always with respect to iconography, that the reclining nudity is depicted in profile or tending towards profile (at least so far), thus recalling the figure of the deposed Christ or rather the exposed Christ (Holbein, Dürer, Carpaccio... up to the “modern” academies and their variations), but also, in a secular sense, the figure of the corpse on an anatomical table (I am also reminded of a plate from Morelli’s “Artistic Anatomy,” a text I believe was still used when Valeria attended high school, and I already knew her then) or, to end with the everyday, the undressed person exhausted by the heat on a summer beach; whereas the upright nudity is, at least in the examples on display, seen from the back, positioned in front of an immediate boundary or obstacle against which it almost presses, to the point that the figure — aided by an aggressive endogenous light — could visually appear wedged into the looming darkness (here I am reminded more than of an icon, of a literary invention such as Dumal’s “hollow men,” bubbles of air and light incorporated into the rock of the “Mount Analogue”; and if I must think of an image, of certain effects of transparency and ambiguity that new lighting technologies have perfected, drawing at least some insights from symbolism — between Redon and Seurat). If the model is taken from a news event, they could be bodies humiliated by a provoked impotence: for example, caught in the rigid posture of the condemned or the searched.
Since I noticed something about the figure-ground relationship in the standing nudes, similarly I observe, with regard to the reclining ones, that in them the degree of luminous power is so strong as to provoke the surrounding magma (the key color is yellow, warm towards orange and even red; cool, towards green and even blue), almost to the point of assimilation. “Almost,” because the powerful trace of the drawing, precise even when barely touched, always outlines the body, freezing, so to speak, its diffusive temptation, enclosing its physical and spiritual identity.
Yet, the one individual is not alone; in fact, he has at least one analogous companion: visible (where the other is positioned parallel, identical and slightly varied especially in the placement of the limbs) or invisible (where the other, we can imagine, is positioned as a mirror image on the hidden side of the boundary).
The destiny is common: destiny of birth, reproduction, and death. This is what Valeria Scuteri tells me, hinting at her own "philosophy of life"; which could leave me indifferent or perplexed, if it did not manifest itself so convincingly and persuasively in the image she creates. Valeria shows me, more with modesty than with reticence, the path that leads her to the most challenging outcomes: it starts from an emotion that flashes into a figure, passes through a series of elaborations from life and in the studio where the emotion and the intuited figure gradually take on a flawless precision, reaching a confidence that frees the gesture and taste from the constraints of expressive approximation. As if to say that almost nothing is left to chance, but precisely because only in this way does the foundational eros – to put it more or less as Plato did – retain all its power, without burning the figure that carries and represents it. It is from that core that what Valeria does not call philosophy but story grows, it is in painting that the story takes shape, as beautiful and convincing as possible. Necessary.
YEAR 1992 - THE INTENSITY OF EMOTIONS, by Angelo Mistrangelo
The season of Valeria Scuteri's painting is identified with the intensity of emotions, with the flow of memories, with the energy of the line that outlines the figures.
It is, therefore, a "writing" imbued with a sort of vital participation in daily events, with a call to a vision of things that, from time to time, become part of the sphere of feelings, of anxious expectations, of subtle restlessness.
His writing appears marked by the cadence of impressions, by a "saying" that connects the "Coded Image" of the man with the tie, captured at the moment he puts it on, to customs, to the search for his own dimension, his own way of being and, at times, of asserting himself.
Next to this man, we discover another with an absent face, distant, erased by pain.
From this depiction emerges, in any case, the artist's relationship with his late father, the old complicity, the sound of his voice, the repetitive gestures that crossed the atmosphere with a slow, measured, meditative manner like the sequence of thought throughout an entire existence.
His drawings, marked by a strong and incisive line, and his paintings, enveloped in color and vibrant with inner energy, characterize the series of <
And in this articulation of the line, the players of a football team take shape in the jubilant moment of joy.
Painting, therefore, as a testimony of life, of ungranted dreams, of meaningful silences.
YEAR 1981 - VALERIA SCUTERI, by Paolo Santarcangeli
When observing the paintings of the young Valeria Scuteri, one thing above all becomes evident: her will, almost aggressive, not to say violent or passionate, to know, understand, and express the world through her own temperament, her own resources, and her own style. In saying this, we refer in particular to her landscapes, full, we might even say dripping with light, wherever or in whatever season they are set. Likewise, it seems clear to us, in this painting, the predominance of a temperament youthfully open to the world, not without passion.
We are, of course, aware of the general nature of such observations: we mention them, however, because in the depictions of the human person that we have been able to see, these aspects are, on the one hand, restrained and, on the other, exalted, in an authentic search for individual truth. This is made manifest, and expressed not without a sense of anguish, in the impressive “Study of a Sick Woman,” which is pervaded by a sense of impending end, of dissolution, now beyond consciousness; or in the image of the young woman gathered in a pose that we can interpret as defense, fatigue, or simply rest. This search could also be given the rather demanding name of pity, in its dual meaning of religious sense of being and of the will to participate in the infinite variations of human destinies.
YEAR 1978 by Piero Bargis
If the most remarkable effect of the historical avant-garde consists in having shifted the terms of the relationship between work of the highest quality and work that has no quality at all, being generic and undifferentiated for everyone, according to a recent statement by Alberto Asor Rosa, and if the political utopia of the most recent aesthetic avant-garde is true, that poets must speak the language of everyone and everyone must speak the language of poets, it follows peremptorily the crisis of form, the perennial difficulty between artist and power, a mentality of negation and disintegration up to the death of art, a funereal toll, which, taken up again from Hegel, now resounds like an Aristotelian “ipse dixit.” While waiting for a world regenerated by an unspeakable historical trajectory, the young struggle in a brawl up to the limits of a fierce cruelty for the new table of values, and the elderly now look at them astonished, now moved, thinking of the long travail of their lives, which, having reached sunset, gathers such thorny and poisoned fruits.
But from this fury of protest, here and there emerge oases of youth who, although affected by the general climate of anguish, confusion, and despair, mindful that nothing is new under the sun, try to master this state of mind, to unify the lacerations, to mend the tears, to look with a fearless eye following the example of great masters still so close to us, like Cézanne, Van Gogh, Soutine, Kokoschka, who recreated the world in their own image and likeness, ready to win and lose at the same time, if this is the cross we must bear.
Certainly, contemporary language bends into a polyvalence of rhythms, often intransitive and reductive, in which communication is exhausted in gentle throbs like a butterfly's wing or bursts forth in the exasperation of hyperrealist shock; however, if – and allow me to repeat myself – Kubler's American hypothesis is true, that as far as the great formal matrices are concerned “les jeux sont faits” I do not think that the pre and post should be so dogmatic, as Norberto Bobbio recently observed regarding certain ideas, which seem old and yet are always new, like that of the intellectual who must be independent with respect to power. The great linguistic matrices always reserve a small vein for patient and faithful researchers: if the choir master is Cézanne or Van Gogh or Soutine or Kokoschka, who would not want to sing with such masters and add their small voice – as long as it is authentic – as a variation on those themes almost infinitely?
These were the thoughts I was mulling over as I descended the endless flights of stairs from Teonesto Deabate's studio, where I had seen the paintings of a painter barely in her twenties: Valeria Scuteri. After graduating from the Art High School in our city and attending some courses at the Academy, she preferred to "apprentice," as the ancients used to say, in the studio of an artist of wide renown and great experience. By painting almost side by side, day after day, a dense dialogue of free suggestions developed between the elderly master and the young student—about a technical subtlety, a color relationship, a light that was too faint or too strong, a master of the past or present; remarkable is the freedom from predetermined grammar and syntax that De Abate allows his disciples, limiting himself to sharpening their sensitivity and passion with the example of a green and vivid old age, punctuated by an ironic little spirit, a spur always awake in encouraging good work.
<< ...The fruits of the independence of such a free formation can be seen upon careful examination of Scuteri's works, which first and foremost immediately stand out for a maturity of vision not at all common for her young age, for the robust compositional structure that does not avoid difficulties but rather seeks them out on purpose, in the non-geometric but emotional division of planes, nevertheless imbued with a strong plasticity, which arises from the accuracy of chromatic relationships. This Calabrian girl, transplanted as a child to our city, often loves to return to the deep south of Riace or Stignano and there, as if astonished, finds again her dear solitary hills, the blue mountains, the deep green of the scrub, the yellows of the slopes; then a "pan dialogue" is woven, which arises from the depths of her consciousness, which needs to push back, ever further back, the veil of naturalistic optics in order to replace an emotional space with an illusionistic one. From the structuring of masses, of blocks, comes the sense of a compressed energy, barely contained, that circulates to animate lights and colors...>>
One could recall, to fully understand the poetics and the line of work of Valeria Scuteri, what has been authoritatively said about a great master like Cézanne, that “he seems animated by the concern of inserting the image into a space, whose perspective definition is different compared to the traditional one and in which, instead of the atmospheric transparency of Impressionist color, he substitutes a compactness of structure, which makes the composition a unified organism.”
Regarding that energetic surge that seems to overflow from every molecule of Scuteri's space, pause for a moment before “The Oak”: an immense vision and yet held with a steady, firm hand, without the slightest weakness in its structure. Through an optical play of extraordinary suggestion, the oak seems to dominate the village below: the rugged and wild nature, the dark greens, the intense yellows, the blocks of houses all contribute to the mythical revelation of a particular genius loci. To grasp the measure of our young artist's talent, observe: “Blue Mountains”; a complex painting, bristling with technical difficulties in the structure of the planes, in the plastic and chromatic richness, resolved with impetuosity. One has the impression that from a primordial chaos the morning of the world has just arisen, a cosmos shining with lights, colors, forms just settled, beginning to live; a moving nature, perpetually in the making, in full osmosis with the artist who realizes a sort of “panism” in which the diaphanous violets, the deep blues, the clear greens, the multiple yellows, in the descending planes rhythmically marked by an open and free syntax, rise to the revelation of a regained aurorality.
Thus in "Heaven and Earth" one senses an anxiety for the infinite that emanates from proceeding by synthesis, with every overlap eliminated, a deep probing: the sky barely veiled by golden clouds, the undulating roundness of the tide of hilltops and the vibrant range of dazzling or scorched yellows, in contrast to the sumptuousness of the greens, are the gift of an imagination that tends toward the universal.
Among the most singular fruits of that impetuous energy that animates Scuteri, "Wind and Country" seems to us: a painting with an unusual layout, a cut that may recall Soutine, especially in those blocks of houses distorted by a windy fury, struck by a dazzling light, contrasted by the deep and shaded concavity of the foreground. A visionary apparition, decadent poetry with its typical illuminations. Whoever wishes to grasp the richness of this artist's chromatic keyboard should observe in "Olives" how green has been explored in an almost exhaustive way, while in the background, in a slight cubism, the brightness of the houses and the barely sketched line of the sky shine. How she then delights in insidious chromatic difficulties in the lively and dramatic counterpoint is demonstrated by the "Bride's Bouquet": the cut flowers begin to live again as if they were still in the ground, but it is the spirit of the painter that nourishes them with new life, making even a base material like the cellophane that wrapped them appear luminous and transparent.
YEAR 1976 - VALERIA SCUTERI, Ernesto Caballo
From her teacher Teonesto Deabate, the very young Valeria Scuteri learned to subject landscapes to her own rhythms: with a felicitous communicative act, she conveys the sense of places, of things in a space that is still Euclidean, yet nonetheless contemporary space (we will immediately set aside this discussion because it would require chapters). Rather, it is the “naturalness” proposed by her teacher that Valeria observes and fulfills, with an organized, modulated color, without clashing chromatics or tonal oscillations; and then, there is the meteorological notion, another punctual Deabatian principle, which constitutes a positive element.
Valeria adds her own touch with a more rugged geography, especially in the watercolors, in the ink drawings of the southern lands, of the Ionian coast, where she truly finds her roots; there is no calculation to escape immediacy, but it is equally evident that the painter questions herself, and has answers, personal poetic outlets (which are, after all, the justification for this exhibition); one senses an inner excavation in these expansive scenographies, sometimes giving the impression of an enveloping plasticity, which, however, does not exclude the conciseness of the line, something far from usual in someone making their debut.
A similar observation applies to the still lifes: this “appointment with the everyday” takes place through solid visual anchors and the study aimed at bringing things back to their origin—in short, a steadfast pact of friendship with nature. The harmonies are calibrated, but the whole, from time to time, prepares for a new ignition; even for Valeria’s canvases of fruits, flowers, and mushrooms, it is fair to say that they are “baskets full of colors.” The relief is pronounced because from two dimensions one can reach a third. Finally, it is legitimate to see an aspiration to break free from a certain impressionism, as confirmed by other paintings in the exhibition, rich in ornamental organization that often becomes constructive: in particular, the compositions with masks, some of which we would like to define as masks of restlessness, referring not to existential choices but rather to Valeria’s intention of seeking new directions.
The figures, the portraits – rare in this solo exhibition – are the sign of a latent expressionistic measure; of all the subjects, she says she prefers the human figure which, starting from the pure anatomical path, represents to ourselves our destiny.
Here it is the rhythm, the tension of the “writing” that invents the form, and this does not mean a contradictory perspective knowing that in young artists the work necessarily has its divergent connections.
What matters is only recognizing oneself in one's work, freeing oneself from unnecessary problems as well as from the annoyance of prophecies and preformed systems. A freedom that, above all, her teacher Deabate offers her and that Valeria manages well, just as she is able to carry out her theory of youth straightforwardly.
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