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Eugene Paul-Emeralds (Art dealer / collector) Judge's Personal Favourite Work review- Premier Art Award London 2019 (31.10.2019)

 

 

I have chosen artwork of Stefania Pinsones 'Isolationism' as my personal favorite because this artist has shown great skill, great vision, precision and a great deal of patience to execute such a masterpiece. When i say great skill I mean in a wide range of disciplines: drawing, architectural, technical, graphic skills, mathematical precision and accuracy in conveying.


Many collectors acquire art because of the love of art and sometimes as a means of escaping our own reality, well this piece I have chosen transports you into a different dimension of time and space.  Maybe a past, present or a future world. Alien architectural structure- projections linking time and space. 

Stefania Pinsone has invented  details of landscape void of human presence, labyrinths, indefinite corridors, mazes, cellular structures.  The artist never use any human entity, nor is any humanoid passage perceived. The structure could be considered a projection of the human brain, the mechanisms that drives the neuronal system or the connections that are inside a complex organism. As they relate to the structure of the brain.


The large sphere of Isolationism in the foreground is compressed by walls with vertical niches, before our eyes in with its rotating band structure that shows the interior between one revolution and another. Around the perimeter it has an intense light. Intuitively blinding like a metallic sun, similar to a Kubrickian spaceship that moves in the territories of brain connectivity.

 

Gianluca Marziani critical review

Stefania Pinsone in her artworks invents details of landscapes without human presence: they are labyrinths, corridors towards an apparent indefinite, structures and tangles in which the medieval component and the future of electronic circuits mix the temporal categories and design places outside the border. During the creative process, Stefania Pinsone imagines the picture in herhead and draws it with pencil on paper, in the same way as she then transforms it into an acrylic on canvas of rare precision. What we discover, among dizzying atmospheres and territories of mystery, has infinitesimal details and the ability to make us navigate between science fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, lysergic culture, William Blake, Peter Greenaway, Friedrich Nietzsche, information technology, Giger, extreme electronic music, William Burroughs, Escher, Ridley Scott, Dante, Kafka and Matrix.

Stefania Pinsone distorts every positive and sunny vision of life. For an optimist in daylight (those who see the world from the best possible side) these paintings cause a real short circuit, given by a dark vision of the inner universe. She does not put any worldly longing inside the painting, everything must take shape beyond the external reasons. She does not belong to the artists who prepare the exhibition in a limited period of time; every painting is born first in the brain, until it reaches complete structuring. Then at that point, it becomes a pencil drawing on paper, according to a perfected work that will lead to the brush on canvas, in formats preferable medium or medium-small sizes. 

Stefania Pinsone will remind you of Escher just as an informal painting will always remember the prototypes of the genre. The only difference is that Stefania Pinsone enters a rarely visited territory, in which Escher appears the only significant presence. So, let's keep

the similarities aside and look at the works with proper depth. We will understand the autonomy of the Roman painter, her world on the border of delirium, the amazing maturity compared to Escher who loved architecture too much to become an infallible painter. 

 

Let's establish some coordinates to understand what I'm going to talk about 

  • a) There is no human presence in the works,

    b) The places are mazes, cellular structures, modules with internal elements, up to sections with intricate tangles reminiscent of electronic circuits 

  • c) The dominant colour is dark and metallic, made with a dark palette and with the use of tones of bronze and silver.

    d) There is no spatial or temporal security: progress and the distant past seem to be parts of the same civilization without living beings. It is an unclassifiable pictorial moment, free from any avant-garde, without extensive epochal references. The paintings have a smell of the Middle Ages but a clear futuristic vision, they seem rich in ancient stones and yet infiltrated by the micro technologies of telematic circuits.

To explain Pinsone with an effective image, we could think of a marble boulder in which ultra-thin cables run for aerospace technology. A contrast between something massive and something minimal. The coexistence of the two roads is rooted very well, today, in Stefania

Pinsone's work: she too, according to the involuntary ambitions of a generation, enters into a cultural movement that frames this dialectic.

 

Further to the points above:

  • a) The artist never uses any human entity, nor can we perceive the signs of a humanoid passing or some recent disappearance of people. The places seem to live in a self-induced state, as if they were feeding on energies internal to the visible architectures. Every structure could be considered a projection of the human brain, of the mechanisms that drive the neuronal systems, of the connections that are inside a complex organism.  As they relate to the structures of the brain, the places justify this form of autonomous life without physical figures. Stefania  Pinsone's paintings represent the journey in an impossible part to film: an imaginary endoscopy in the depths of the most advanced software world (I speak of the fateful grey matter). They are pure visions constructed, but at the same time full of references that touch the informatics, the telematic networks, the basic schemes and derivatives of electronics. It mirrors the modules of computer software to explain the work of the brain: it is really pure madness to catapult us into the unexplored territories of the invisible body. 

  • b) We talk about places as a metaphor, representation, mental idea of an independent mechanism. What we see can be traced back to the patterns of the labyrinth and the composite structure. Two ways, in fact, through the entire production of the artist: on the one hand (labyrinths) the system of corridors of the streets with obligatory distance, according to the logic of a radiating centre and of intricate radial or concentric quadrature designs; on the other (composed structures) there are the modules, the cells with internal elements, the various serial groupings of deep geometries. Precisely geometry and mathematics become an algebraic constant of the paintings: each part responds to scientific elements, lives on structural synergies, exists in perfect harmony with the other areas. All places are regulated by a silent order that maintains immobility and balance. The apparently inorganic life of those environments grows internally, where our eye does not perceive the dynamism of organic evolution.

  • c) Colour defines the right interior propensity of the artist. Never any real light, no iridescent colours or pastel tones. Dark parts and metallic brightness stand out, vibrant on bronze and silver. They are the colours of extreme technology, there is the darkness that reigns in the infernal journeys of Dante and Blake, the smell of the night that beats in Kafka and Burroughs. Nocturnes from metallic vampirism, as if the new Dracula were those mechanisms of which we see the superficial and shiny skin. The progress of information technology has these colours, at least in the representation of its internal biology. And on such coldness Stefania Pinsone imagines the connection systems that divide the brain into compartments and scans. Each of us is a living part of every painting, almost as if the prototype of a brain exemplifies what happens in brain mechanics. I believe it is a just analysis of our society: certainly extreme, since it was born from a radical artist, yet able to synthesize a brain that rebels against external society and lives its own autonomy.

  • d) The entire production does not give indications of space and time. Ideally, we perceive the Middle Ages of castles and royal  fortresses, the rigorous coldness of that dark and Masonic era. But at the same time, we feel a perfect rigor that only the electronic future can tell us. The hybridization between distant past and distant future appears perfectly resolved: it is as if Pinsone isolates details of a world that only she knows, blocking the eye on a tiny section that provides an atmosphere and an environment beyond those places, but we can just imagine them. The only certainty belongs to the connections painted, autonomous in their breaking

    away from the little humanistic delirium of certain social atrocities.

 
 
 
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