Capturing the light
To capture the light that is the soul of the world and the source of our energy has always been the favoured theme of modern and contemporary art.
If art has the capacity to influence our states of mind, then this research is one of the paths that many artists have followed, and others are preparing to do so.
Pietra Barrasso’s cascades and contaminations of light merit attention both for their originality and for their execution.
The artist has arrived at her confrontation with light, always one of the most complicated aspects of art, after a solid experience in painting, and after having faced up to important challenges and won them.
Let’s look at them briefly before returning to her current production, concentrating on two themes resolved with great ability and in which we see the first seeds of the atmospheric light of this period.
First of all the landscape, another traditional approach that the artist tackles, with a sense of light imbuing her brushstrokes and an attention to colour that makes us experience the sense of movement on the canvas. Hers is a landscape that, from a traditional approach, opens up original horizons, starting from those combinations of colour and the management of the composition of the elements from which it is easy to predict their future within the complicated theme of light in art.
Another aspect of her development, one resolved with great ability, is her approach to religious subjects. The luminosity of the form that alludes to the divine light of the images themselves presents the reality of the boundary between the physical and heavenly dimensions, experienced through her research into colour.
Through coherent study and her personal sensitivity she has gathered together the fruit grown from seeds sown in her past series, and she deals with the theme so dear to Turner and Rothko.
And light implies a work on two fronts: the artistic one for colour, and the emotive one for the change that comes about in the viewers after the discovery of the work of art.
The artist is now in her full maturity and, with great originality, she puts on her canvases those floods of light, those luminous cascades that form a bridge between our own spirituality and the environment that surrounds us, one that we begin to discover when we allow it to interact with the “parallel world” that is within each one of us.
We can see this in “Fascio di luce” and “Stratificazione di luce”, 2011, and in “Rosso tramonto”, 2012.
This is why Pietra Barrasso’s work is such a real and difficult research in the universes of contemporary art, because it brings with it the seeds for changing people’s elementary emotions. Only genuine art manages to undertake this task.
“For miracles it is necessary to pray, for changes it is necessary to work” (Saint Thomas Aquinas).
