The disorder of the soul
Francesca Tessaro(Edited by)
In “IL NUOVO FVG”
4 March 2005, no. 194, p.21

Vania Comoretti, a young painter from Udine, reproduces faces and body parts that might seem pictures at first sight, but actually disguise an impressive painting technique and a profound inner analysis.

Hyper-realistic paintings of faces and parts of the body, pictures that bring to light the disorder of the soul that is inside all of us, it is a decomposed mosaic that guides our eye through the lines and the surface of the visage. It is the “Entropy”, leading principle and title of the art exhibition that Vania Comoretti, a young artist from Udine, has opened last February at the Image Furini Contemporary Art Gallery in Arezzo.
People, in her works, become souls that tell everyday chronicles: their underlined wrinkles and emphasised marks are not meant to focus on age, but rather on time, instants fixed in the lines before fading away.
In a conversation with Vania Comoretti we wil try to outline the main features of her work and artistic background.

The exhibition is entitled “Entropia”, a title of great impact: what kind of relation is there between your art and the tendency to disorder?

At a superficial reading of my works, entropy might seem to be in complete contrast with the perfectionism and analycity of the technique. At a more careful view, you realise that I depict the inner dimension of the people I portray, I reproduce that tangle of emotions and sensations that is inside all of us, and its tendency to disorder.

Your paintings are not a display of mannerism, not a mere reproduction of photographs or characters, they go beyond the portrayed subject. Considering all this, what do these portraits convey?

The thing that most interests me is the sense of vulnerability that emerges from these faces: the frailty of flesh, soul and feelings. We are vulnerable, this is my point.

How do you produce your artworks?

At first sight my paintings might seem pictures, but photographs are only the starting point: I couldn’t do this kind of painting drawing from life. I choose one picture, I square the paper sheet and copy the image. Afterwards I paint the backgroud and the rough traits with different shades of ink and water-colour, and finally define the image with pastels. The result is an image with all the details of faces and parts of the body minutely emphasised.

All your paintings have mere white or black backgrounds that even amplify the sense of loneliness. What is the reason for the choice of blank backgrounds?

I isolate the character to emphasise its figure. However backgrounds have changed through the years. At the beginning they used to be dark, afterwards light colours started to prevail, conveying a less oppressive feeling. In my first works, both the choice of close ups and the range of colours used – cold colours, ranging from green to blue – would turn the pictures in a sort of anatomical tables for surgical investigation, in which the characters wouldn’t participate at all. In my present works characters are active, concerned, they communicate with the viewer and the light background makes the athmosphere less gloomy. The choice of backgrunds has evolved: characters are still isolated from reality, but in a different way.

Most of your paintings portray young women whose subtle expressiveness is not found in today homologated pictures. How do you choose your characters?

I usualy go for peope of my age: I do not look for adolescents or mature people, I instintively look for people of my own age – my friends, this far – and portray them. My aim is not to paint perfect beauty or shocking ugliness, but rather to realise an image that dives deep into small things, in light wrinkles. I portray normal faces with slight imperfections that alltogether compose an harmonious whole.

Why do you choose people of your age?

Because we share a whole world of common experiences, ours is an age of incertitude: still a lot of life to live, but at the same time there is a substantial past behind one’s back. In the end, it is a way of dealing with my life. I take the features of one person, his or her face becomes a map of the inner world. There is a double fil rouge in my works: the technique and the emotion that they convey; every subject is unique and different from the others, but still there is myself shining through all of them.

Do the people that sat for your works feel comfortable with your representation, or is it difficoult for them to recognise themselves in your paintings?

At first they feel I have emphasised their faults, made them ugly, but at a more careful view they recognize themselves psychologically, or at least they recognise their mood at the time of the session.

Which art and which artists have influenced you most?

It might sound strange but I am not much interested in hyper-realism, I rather draw my inspiration from photography, especially from those photographers that have left a deep mark in this field: Thomas Struth and Thomas Demand – what srikes me most of their pictures is a sense of silence and suspension. The painters that have most influenced me are Georges de La Tour and Johannes Vermeer, seventeenth century painters, and the moderns Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

What are your plans for the future?

My first committment is to improve my art, to enlarge the size of the paintings, for example involving the whole body and to guide viewers’ attention to other than faces.