It’s difficult to remain indifferent when confronted with the works of Giovanna Andreassi.
It’s clear that in the search for her own particular, personal dimension her experience is moving her into an artistic realm of great contrasts.
The artistic world of Andreassi seems to oscillate between the search for a lost epoch that surfaces, not so much as nostalgia but as the explicit declaration of suffering and pain.
She pursues this theme along two alternative paths: one, an undeveloped but detailed research that takes us, amongst other places, to the Universe of our childhood and its games (but the hue is always redolent of a journey far from the possibility of consolation) and a second, which is the classic search for one’s self, or fragments of one’s self, that takes form in that most classic of ways, the journey.
In this way, some very interesting canvasses are born that under an apparent and reassuring pictorial form, slowly reveal glimpses of a reality beyond, that captures, transforms and consumes the reality it crosses, that keeps that which it needs and cruelly rids itself of the superfluous, which it denounces.
The journey naturally carries Andreassi into contact with a different artistic sphere that moves from the objective to the subjective, the search shifting gradually so that it is happening no longer in a world of change (in which we live) but in a darker dimension (in which everything is inanimate and still) and in which the self-portrait reveals an absence of hope, the crusted gangrene of the world.
Certainly very moving, this latest phase of the artist is the result of a certain contemporary taste that is concentrated on the ‘trash’ effect of the subjects, exactly because her symbolism should be read as a denunciation of the discomfort which afflicts humanity.
This is surely the aim of the artist who has shown herself mistress of a purity and artistic sensibility that merits, thanks to her professionalism, a higher goal.
To communicate with the other world-individual and through this dialogue find and rediscover oneself by struggling against one’s own continuously changing identity, a nightmare game in which good and evil, irony and drama go hand in hand, seems to be the aim of her new search but….is this really her final destination?
Silvia Campana
May 2007
