By Antonello Marino
Segno 214 (July-September 2007)
For those who are familiar with Beatrice Pediconi’s previous work, the exhibition at Galleria Bonomo in Bari certainly constitutes a surprise. At first view the contrast between the clear photos of modernist buildings that marked her architectural project and the rarefied and fluctuating atmosphere that characterizes these new works is strong. On the pearly-hued walls, surfaces furrowed by stains, flecks, and filaments in the same tones stand out. They are liquid, abstract images of eastern refinement, in which the Roman artist draws on water with ink and the complicity of natural light, which guides the wait for the right snap. A slow “pictorial” technique, made of silences, of apparitions in part casual and mysterious, of harmonies with “inner resonances”. From the “subtle bodies” obtained by introducing a small quantity of ink with a syringe in a full basin, to the subsequent “movements” created by the effects of shadows and expansions, until the “uncompositions” where the traces halve themselves and multiply in reciprocal symbiosis, the unfolding story fixed by the lens unravels with complex implications. Those implications pass from tension to the genesis of form as discovery in itself, to a subsequent process of growth, to meeting and relating to others. It is a mute composition, parallel to the transmission of emotions through music (as emphasized by the background presence of Satie). An “intimate and emotional” exploration that in the end reveals the tie with its past. In fact, as in the architectural works, the concern is to point out connections extending beyond the visible evidence, evoking hidden presences like self-portraits that project themselves, now in a more explicit way, towards other dimensions, other worlds, other possibilities.